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English Courses: Required and Elective

Spring 2025: English Literature & Cultural Studies Courses

ENG 105 - The Bible as Literature

Meeting Time: TTH 12:30-1:50
Professor: Dr. Cynthia Scheinberg

Have you ever felt you wanted to know more about the Bible but felt intimidated by the very thought of opening a Bible? Or are you someone who has a comfort level with the Bible in your own religious context, but wants to know more about its literary qualities? The main goal of this course is to help students become familiar with one the most famous “anthologies” ever compiled– the Bible –and to learn how to read it as a literary text.  Organized by the major literary genres of the Bible, this course explores significant themes, characters, and teachings in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the Christian Scriptures (New Testament). We will explore the diverse cultures, religious traditions, and historical contexts that influenced this famous text. As we learn how to read Biblical texts as literature, we will also ask questions about Biblical meaning that include: Do these scriptural/literary texts offer models for how to live a good or virtuous life? Does belief define identity? How is the relationship to God explored through particular identity, culture, or peoplehood?  Finally, we will include units on films and other literature that have used/adapted Biblical sources in more contemporary contexts. No prior knowledge of the Bible or religion is necessary. This course meets the Social Inquiry General Education requirements, as well as the Diversity Equity and Inclusion requirement for all students.  

ENG 220 – Reading Like a Pro: Theory and Interpretation

Meeting Time: MTH 2-3:20
Professor: Dr. Jason Jacobs

This course introduces students to the most important critical and theoretical methods of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and gives students a chance to practice interpreting works of culture (mainly literature, but also film and other forms of popular culture) using different critical approaches. Critical movements featured include New Criticism, Structuralism, Marxist Criticism, Feminist Criticism, LGBT Studies and Queer Theory, Race-conscious criticism (especially the African American critical tradition), and Postcolonial Studies; but students will gain an overall understanding of how any critical/theoretical movement develops its own terms and methods and how different terms and methods can be put to work to produce new ways of understanding culture. This course is required for English Literature Majors, English Literature Minors, and Cultural Studies Minors and meets the Social Inquiry General Education requirement for all students.

ENG 250 – Girls on Fire in North American Literature (cross listed as CULST 373)

Meeting Time: TTH 12:30-1:50
Professor: Dr. Laura D’Amore 

Girls on Fire reads early North American literatures that center girls and young women as protagonists who inspire progressive transformation for the future. This course includes a range of works from different historical time periods as well as a variety of genres and forms. We  will read key texts of the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries,  focusing on these areas: pre-Colonial Indigenous myths and legends that foreground the sacred feminine; texts written by women (Susana Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791), and Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892)); and texts written about girls and young women (Captain Smith’s writing about Pocohontas, documents and records of the Salem Witch Hunt, Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl on the Streets (1893)). Using the Girls on Fire framework, students will have the opportunity to read these representations of historically marginalized identities (race, gender, sexual identity, class, religion) in ways that reclaim and reposition girls and young women of early North America as progressive social change agents. This course counts toward the American Literature requirement for English Literary Studies majors and meets the Social Inquiry General Education requirement for all students. 

ENG 280 – King Arthur: Forbidden Desires

Meeting Time: TTH 9:30-10:50
Professor: Dr. Jason Jacobs 

The legendary King Arthur is born, Geoffrey of Monmouth tells us, as the product of an adulterous seduction, facilitated by disguise, deception, and Merlin’s magic. This course brings together key texts from the medieval Arthurian tradition in order to explore a central theme: the desire for an object we can’t—or shouldn’t—have. Whether enflamed by love for another’s wife or driven to find a Grail they are too morally compromised to attain, the knights of King Arthur’s court are animated by impulses that deft rather than exemplify the stated values of their society, allowing us to pose critical questions about what’s really going on in a tradition featuring “perfect” knights and lofty ideals. Texts will include Chrétien de Troyes 12^th-century verse romances The Knight of the Cart (Lancelot) and The Story of the Grail (Perceval), the 13^th-century anonymous Quest of the Grail, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and selections from Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. This course counts toward the British Literature requirement for English Literary Studies majors and meets the Social Inquiry General Education requirement for all students.

ENG 320 – Global Literatures: Fiction from Africa

Meeting Time: MTH 3:30-14:50
Professor: Dr. Cynthia Scheinberg

In this course, we will look at fiction (written in English) from writers representing a range of African countries, including Nigeria, Cameroon, Zimbabwe and South Africa, among others, with a focus on women writers. Topics will include colonial and post-colonial history, African responses to Western representations of Africa, environment and climate, gender and sexuality, exile and immigration; we will also watch a Nollywood (“Nigerian Hollywood”) film.  Students will do research projects on different aspects of these national cultures and writers to contextualize our readings within the diversity of African identities and nationalities; we will devote some time to the important critical theorists in this field as well.   Finally, we will consider our own positionality as U.S. based readers of African literatures, considering questions like: what responsibilities do readers have when they engage with literary traditions that are not our own, how can we consider and reconsider our different assumptions about African identity, and how reading these texts might broaden our assumptions about literature more generally. Along with weekly reading, assignments will include online discussion boards, informal responses, a final project and research presentations. This course counts toward the Global Literature requirement for English Literary Studies majors.

ENG 480 – Senior Thesis I

Meeting Time: F 11-1:50
Professor: Dr. Laura D’Amor

This course is essentially a reading seminar: the first semester of the English majors’ capstone course sequence emphasizes applications of literary theory through intensive analysis of primary works, research into pertinent criticism, and the delivery of a substantial oral presentation. Students’ course work culminates in a formal thesis proposal with an extended bibliography. Required for all English Literary Studies BA students and Secondary Education/English double majors.

CULST 100 - Approaches to the Study of Society and Culture

Meeting Time: TuTh 8-9:20
Professor: TBD

Meeting Time: TuTh 9:30-10:50
Professor: TBD

This course teaches students to analyze a variety of sources related to popular culture, material culture, and the built environment to examine diverse issues concerning race, class, gender, and sexuality. Using a variety of sources, such as popular culture, material culture, and the built environment, and viewing them through diverse lenses, such as race, class, gender, sexuality, and religion, students will practice applying the skills of retrieval, evaluation, analysis and interpretation of written, visual, and aural evidence in the construction of well-argued narratives.  All students are welcome. No prerequisites. This course is required for all Cultural Studies minors, counts as an elective for English Literary Studies majors and minors, and meets the Social Inquiry General Education requirement for all students.

CULST 372 – Gender in American Popular Culture

Meeting Time: MTh 3:30-4:50
Professor: TBD 

Popular culture serves as a starting point for analyzing representations of gender and the ways that various social forces (race, class, ethnicity, religion, disability, class) converge to produce gender, including ways that we reenact and resist gendered norms.

CULST 372 – Movies & Movie Going Across Time

Meeting Time: MWF 10-10:50
Professor: Dr. Jennifer Stevens

Do we see ourselves reflected back on the big screen?  If so, how? Using movies across time, from blockbusters to smaller independent films, we will explore how the act of viewing movies has changed over the past century.  We’ll explore the ways that “the movies” both reflect who we are and also influence who we are. Organized chronologically, this class is about the movies and about the audience(s) that consumes them.  

CULST 372 - Girls on Fire

Meeting Time: TuTh 12:30-1:50
Professor: Dr. Laura D’Amore

Girls on Fire reads early North American literatures that center girls and young women as protagonists who inspire progressive transformation for the future. This course includes a range of literatures from different historical time periods as well as a variety of genres and forms. We  will read key texts of the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries,  focusing on these areas: pre-Colonial Indigenous myths and legends that foreground the sacred feminine; texts written by women (Susana Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791), and Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892)); and texts written about girls and young women (Captain Smith’s writing about Pocohontas, documents and records of the Salem Witch Hunt, Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl on the Streets (1893)). Using the Girls on Fire framework, students will have the opportunity to read these representations of historically marginalized identities (race, gender, sexual identity, class, religion) in ways that reclaim and reposition girls and young women of early North America as progressive social change agents. This course meets an upper-level requirement for Cultural Studies minors, an elective requirement for English Literary Studies majors and minors, and meets the Social Inquiry General Education requirement for all students. 

Fall 2024: ENG LIT & Cultural Studies Courses

ENG 100 - Mindful Reading

Meeting Time: Mon/Thurs 3:30 - 4:50pm
Professor: Dr. Cynthia Scheinberg

This is a course for students who like to read and discuss literature. It will cover a variety of literary forms including poetry, short fiction, novel, drama and/or non-fiction prose.  Students will learn to identify the building blocks of literary genres, while also practicing interpretation, close-reading and historical contextualization.  Readings and discussions will highlight how diverse identities and perspectives impact the creation and interpretation of literature, as well as discuss different attitudes to literature from different historical and national contexts.  Along with an emphasis on techniques of mindful and critical reading, students will also be introduced to various modes of critical writing about literature, including personal reflection, close-reading and persuasive use of evidence.  

Counts for the English Literary Studies major as well as the Social Inquiry and Humanities GE requirement. No pre-requisites or prior experience with literature required.

ENG 201 - Myth, Fantasy, Imagination

Meeting Time: Tues/Thurs 11:00am - 12:20pm
Professor: Dr. Susan Pasquarelli

Undertake an odyssey to meet Scylla, the sea monster with six heads and twelve leg

s who devoured passing sailors; Circe, the exiled goddess who turned men into pigs; Polyphemus, the cyclop, who was heartbroken when Galatea spurned his love. Examine other worlds, civilizations, cultures, and human voices through ancient Greek and Roman myths.

Students read ancient and modern texts; interpret associated artwork; retell myths in well-crafted prose; investigate how and why many of the same universal concerns are expressed in the wisdom literature of the ancients; and collaboratively and actively engage in Socratic seminars, Readers’ theatre, writing workshops and focused study groups. Past classes have also created their own gods and monsters out of clay!

This is a general education course in the Humanities category. All majors welcome. No pre-requisites.  This course is required for all ENG/SEC ED majors; ENG majors prior to catalog year 2022; and, satisfies a literature requirement for CW majors.  It can be taken as an elective for all majors, catalog year 2022 and later.

ENG 280.01 - SpTp: Science Fiction

Meeting Time: Tues/Fri 3:30 - 4:50pm
Professor: Dr. Christine Haverington

Ready for an interactive, highly collaborative, critical and creative exploration of constructions of power, identity, agency, utopian and dystopian cultures represented in classic and contemporary science fiction literature and pop culture? This is the course for you! We will read, analyze and compare sci fi texts by British and American authors Aldous Huxley, Kurt Vonnegut, Anne Charnock, Ursula LeGuin, and Octavia Butler. Your work in the course will include shared and independent readings and viewings, literary analyses, collaborative creative writing, and meta-cognitive reflection.

ENG 301 - Queer Fiction in the US

Meeting Time: Mon/Thurs 2:00 - 3:20pm
Professor: Dr. Jason Jacobs

How do we live now? This question, which this course explores through interpretive readings of literary fictions produced by queer authors in the US since the year 2000, can be read in multiple ways. First, in the sense of, now what? How do we live now that HIV can be reduced in the human body to undetectable levels through medication, and the same medications can prevent HIV infection in the first place? Now that gay and lesbian people are guaranteed marriage rights in every state? Now that trans people have unprecedented access to visibility and are at the same time under increased threat of legal and physical violence? But also, in the sense of: what are we all up to? What choices are queer people making? What’s important to queer people—what, if any, are our collective cultural values, political goals, even dreams? What obstacles do queer people face, and how are they contending with them? What’s it like to give in to, or resist, the pressures to be “normal people,” “just like everyone else”? What opportunities and risks accompany one choice or the other—for gay men and lesbians, for bisexuals, for trans and nonbinary folks? And finally, how do the lives we live now connect with the past and its legacies? Are we still working out the old traumas of homophobia and transphobia, of the closet and silencing, of AIDS…or are we getting somewhere new?

ENG 350 - Shakespeare

Meeting Time: Mon/Thurs 3:30-4:50pm
Professor: Dr. Lori Lee Wallace

This variable topics course identifies topics related to Shakespeare’s plays (e.g., Shakespeare’s Contemporaries, Shakespeare’s Tragedies, Shakespeare’s Comedies, Shakespeare Then and Now, etc.) No matter what the topic, the emphasis will be on the stage and performance. Students will closely examine the playwright’s written word, and how performances bring those words to life. Shakespeare’s art, catholic in nature and scope, is also a historic reservoir, providing students a rich opportunity to explore the social, political, religious, scientific, and historical conditions that underpin his works. 

ENG 481 - Senior Thesis II

Meeting Time: Tues 5:00 - 7:50pm
Professor: Cynthia Scheinberg

In the second semester of the Senior Seminar, each student writes a substantial thesis of publishable quality based upon readings explored in ENG 480. Primarily a writing seminar, students meet individually with the professor each week to advance the draft through the writing process. Students present abstracts of their final papers at a public colloquium.

CULST 100 - Approaches to the Study of Society and Culture

Meeting Time: Tues/Thurs 9:30 - 10:50am 
Professor: Prof. Leslie Grinner

Meeting Time: Tues/Thurs 11:00am - 12:20pm
Professor: Prof. Leslie Grinner

Meeting Time: Mon/Thurs 3:30 - 4:50pm
Professor: Dr. Dean Lampros

Meeting Time: Mon/Thurs 5:00 - 6:20pm
Professor: Dr. Dean Lampros

This course teaches students to analyze a variety of sources related to popular culture, material culture, and the built environment to examine diverse issues concerning race, class, gender, and sexuality.

No prerequisites. This course is a lower level interdisciplinary elective option for ENG majors. It can also substitute as a an ENG 100-level course.

CULST 370: SpTp: The Dark Fantastic

Meeting Time: Weds 5:00 - 7:50pm
Professor: Prof. Leslie Grinner

This course is intended to provide an inquiry into Black Identities, Representations, & Performances within the interdisciplinary field of Africana Studies. It will provide an overview of critical positions in Black Identity Theory, Black Feminist Cultural Studies, Critical Race Theory, and Performativity. We will be exploring the politics of identity, representation, and racial performativity in media and popular culture. Students are expected to become familiar with critical paradigms, theories, and rationales within an Africana Studies framework. Students are not required to be or to become Critical Race Theorists but are expected to be able to read and understand the theoretical positionings of Africana Studies and to construct analytical arguments based upon these positionings. While this class holds Black American identities as its primary focus, we will also be exploring Black identities, representations, and performances from an inter/transnational perspective.

CULST 372: Television and Identity

Meeting Time: M/W/F 9:00 - 9:50am
Professor: Dr. Jennifer Stevens

Description coming soon!

CULST 373: Public Shaming in Contemporary Culture

Meeting Time: Tues/Fri 2:00 - 3:20pm
Professor: Professor Kaila Carroll

Public shaming has historically been used to define society's boundaries. With the advent of social media platforms, new methods of stigmatizing norm violators have emerged. This course will examine how public shame has been used to define societal boundaries as well as discuss the politics, and ethics of utilizing public shaming given the permanent nature of social media's online footprint. Public shaming will be observed through the theoretical lenses of labeling, stigma, and social control. Additionally, this course will discuss various legislation governments have enacted to combat the long-term ramifications of a culture of public shaming.

No prerequisites. This course is an interdisciplinary elective option for ENG majors. 

GSS.100 - Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies 

Meeting Times: Mon/Thurs 3:30 - 5:00pm
Professor: Dr. Jason Jacobs

This course introduces students to the social, cultural, and imaginative processes through which people are categorized in terms of sex and gender, and how this categorization shapes individual experiences of the world (including structures of power, privilege, and oppression). We examine theoretical models for analyzing gender, as well as the experiences, historical conditions, and intersections of gender and sexuality with social factors of diversity (race, class, nation, religion)