Course Offerings - Graduate Programs

Graduate Courses - Spring 2026

ENGL 7001.001 - Facts of Fiction - J. Wheeler

T 3:00-5:50 Allen 202

In this workshop we’ll explore the ways in which the tools of nonfiction writing, particularly research and reporting, can enrich the craft of fiction writing. We’ll read and discuss works of fiction that show evidence of extensive research/reporting. You’ll conduct research/reporting of your own to write one literary essay. Then you’ll use that essay as the basis for writing a work of short fiction. Both writings will be workshopped by the class.

ENGL 7007.001 - Poetry Writing - A. Clay

T 6:00-8:50 Allen 202

Along with discussing student poems in a workshop environment, we’ll consider the role of ekphrasis and collaboration in the creative process. Students will complete weekly prompts that encourage dialogue with other art forms, including both visual and performative work (a few examples: paintings, sculpture, dance, music, etc.). In addition to drafting original work, we’ll also read and discuss poems that successfully incorporate ekphrasis in creative and innovative ways. Students will submit a portfolio of twenty new poems by the end of the semester.

ENGL/THTR 7008.001 - Writing Drama (Workshop) - F. Euba

M 3:30-6:20 Room TBA

The workshop focuses on the creative process of playwriting. First discussing various topics constituting the process, using the works of established playwrights, it will initiate class exercises that will lead to the writing of two one-acts or a full length, all of which will be read and critiqued in class.

ENGL 7106.001 - Forms of Fiction - M. Ruffin

W 12:30-3:20 Allen 226

This class is part workshop, part seminar. In this class, students will learn about numerous forms of fiction writing and write fictional pieces. The following is a non-exclusive list of fictional forms: micro fiction, flash fiction, short story, novelette, novella, novel, novel in stories, fiction in translation, prose poem, persona poem, hybrid, fake memoir, gonzo journalism, experimental fiction. Most of all, this class is for the creatively adventurous and designed to foster fun.

ENGL 7137.001 - Chaucer’s Tales - R. Godden

Th 3:00-5:50 Allen 113

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340-1400) seems to stand at the beginning of a lofty tradition of English literature. Yet this distant figure of the Middle Ages wrote texts that can seem perplexing, funny, somber, fragmentary, deceptive, surprisingly modern and also bewilderingly alien. In our class, we will consider how Chaucer’s writings are at once achingly familiar in their treatment of recurring themes such as love, death, community, and power, but also how they are the product of their own times, a turbulent era of social and political upheaval. We will not only learn about the medieval world in which Chaucer wrote and worked, but we will also explore how Chaucer’s poetry can shed light on our own contemporary questions and concerns. We will primarily focus on his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, a fragmentary and unfinished collection of texts supposedly told on a ride to a Saint’s Shrine.

ENGL 7541.001 - Rhetoric, Public Memory, and Civil Rights - J. Osborne

M 12:30-3:20 Allen 202

The memory of the civil rights movement holds an almost sacred place within the narrative of America. Boycotts, bus rides, speeches, and sacrifice undergird the shared memory of the United States collectively held by citizens even as those who lived through the era pass away. Beyond the shared memories among the public, though, are questions of how these memories initially formed. Memories are not histories or complete recollection of events, but invented narratives constructed around an occasion designed to communicate knowledge of the past for current and future audiences. This course analyzes the rhetorical choices that inform public memories of the civil rights movement – the figures we elevate (or don’t), the words we recount (or don’t), the places we preserve (or don’t), the politics we endorse (or don’t).

ENGL 7921.001 - Autobiography and the Novel - J. Kronick

Th 12:00-2:50 Allen 202

Roland Barthes famously said that “autobiography is the genre that dare not speak its name.” He is alluding, of course, to Oscar Wilde’s famous statement at his trial for indecency and is acknowledging that, in autobiography as in the novel, the division between fact and fiction, life and art is porous. We will begin with Wilde’s De Profundis and Wilde’s desire to make life into art and then turn to autobiographical novels and novels disguised as autobiographies. We will examine the relation of narrative forms to subjectivity, time, memory, and death. Our focus will be on Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, and J. M. Coetzee, three writers for whom ethical thought is captured not by subject matter but by artistic and literary form. We will read critical essays on or pertaining to autobiography by James Olney, Paul de Man, Roland Barthes, and others, in addition to essays and lectures by our four subjects.

ENGL 7930.001 - Dissertation Workshop - L. Coats

W 12:30-3:20 Allen 202

This workshop focuses on developing your PhD dissertation project ideas, getting them in writing, and refining them. You will make progress on your dissertation, whether you are just starting your prospectus or finishing a last chapter. As a class, we will spend time examining models of academic writing in our respective fields to consider issues of writing styles, methodological models, text choices, and readers and audiences. We will also refine our own processes, including the vital step of revision in response to feedback given by colleagues. Through writing and workshopping that writing, this course is designed to help you hone your writing skills and processes to give you a better sense of your dissertation’s argument as well as of the conversation you’re having via that writing with those in and beyond our class.

ENGL 7974.001 - Abolition Geographies - A. Meany

W 3:30-6:20 Allen 202

How do writers imagine liberation under constraint? What forms of radical placemaking emerge within and across histories of racial capitalism, carcerality, and settler dispossession? This seminar takes up Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s concept of “abolition geography” to explore how 20th and 21st century Multi-Ethnic U.S. novels stage liberatory struggles and reimagine space, home, and belonging. We will approach abolition as a political and intellectual project and literary method, examining how fiction contributes to the collective project of imagining other worlds. Readings may include novels by Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Helena María Viramontes, John Okada, and others.

ENGL 7983.001 - Present Fiction: Theorizing the Global Anglophone Novel, 2020-2025 - P. Rastogi

T 12:00-2:50 Allen 212-C

Present Fiction will theorize the Global Anglophone novel as a distinctive genre, focusing on its landmark works from the past five years. What characteristics, traits, themes, and preoccupations define a novelistic form that spans cultures, countries, and continents? How have the cataclysmic events of the 2020s shaped its structure, style, and narrative techniques? Each novel will be paired with a theoretical or critical text to build our understanding of Global Anglophone fiction in its most recent manifestation. Readings may include Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel, Salman Rushdie’s The Eleventh Hour, Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo’s The Tiny Things Are Heavier, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, Zadie Smith’s The Fraud, and Damon Galgut’s The Promise.