Course Offerings - Graduate Programs

Graduate Courses - Fall 2026

7001.001 Creative Nonfiction

TBD T 12:00-2:50 Allen 202

7007.001 Poetry Workshop

A. Francisco M 12:30-3:20 Allen 226

Portals Into Language

As poets, language is both our inspiration and our medium, it’s what we consume in order to create, what gets filtered through our creative imaginations and becomes uniquely our own. But what happens when we read and break down poems that come from elsewhere, that arrive into English from different languages and countries and cultures? How does a poem written in a completely different language with different rules and traditions break open our understanding of English, and how can we use that to forge new paths in our own writing, create new doors into new imaginations? In this course we will examine and analyze a range of poets in translation from non-US countries and non-English languages, venturing to new locations with each text. We’ll look at the ways in which these poets bring their understanding of what a poem can do into English, how they expand our understanding of syntax and line, how they’re use and creation of metaphor is different from our own, and how they build images in completely new (to us) ways. How does Alejandra Pizarnik’s (Argentina, Spanish/French) syntax reflect the terror and anxiety of her poems in English? How does Hagiwara Sakutaro (Japan, Japanese) invert and expand on traditional Japanese imagery, and how do we receive that? We will have weekly readings and poetry prompts derived from those readings in which we attempt to replicate some of the techniques we pull from the poems and we will give feedback on our peers' poems as well. This is a generative workshop, so we’ll be writing a poem every week (or a reading response).

7009.001 Screenwriting

Z. Godshall M 3:30-6:20 Allen 202

In this workshop students will practice and discuss the art and craft of screenwriting while honing their critical abilities. Everyone will submit works-in-progress for intensive student-led workshop discussion, culminating in the completion of a feature-length screenplay. This course is designed for students who are both familiar with and new to screenplay format and structure.

7020.001 Proseminar

A. Meany T 6:00-8:50 Allen 212-C

This course serves as an introduction to current theoretical and methodological approaches in literary studies through a series of keywords that drive humanistic inquiry. Rather than a comprehensive overview, this course spotlights prominent, politically attuned questions and debates that shape the field today. While the areas covered may not reflect every scholar's sense of the discipline’s dominant frameworks, the course offers a deliberate entry point into the dynamic and contested terrain of literary studies.

The collective aims of the course are threefold: (1) to cultivate an understanding of core approaches in the field by evaluating their limitations and affordances; (2) to engage with and conduct advanced scholarly research; and (3) to attend to the professional requirements and expectations of the discipline. In addition to tracing the conceptual contours of an evolving field, we will address a number of topics under the broad heading of professionalization, including the trajectory of graduate study, strategies for using course work effectively to prepare for the dissertation, presenting at conferences, and publishing. The course will be punctuated by a number of keyword panels, in which students will present conference length papers. Students will leave the course with an enhanced understanding of contemporary literary study and the tools to engage in critical dialogue with purpose and precision.

7106.001 Fiction

J. Davis Th 12:00-2:50 Allen 212-C

Linked Narratives: Story Cycles & Novels-in-Stories

This seminar (half workshop, half craft exploration) will focus on linked story collections and novels-in-stories, works that build momentum through echoes, accumulation, and pattern rather than traditional linear plot. Our discussions will focus on the craft problems and opportunities of the form: continuity and rupture, recurrence and variation, shifts in point of view, recurring motifs, timelines, gaps, and the ways in which a place can become its own character, linking a collection. To enrich our conversations, we will read a variety of linked story collections and novels-in-stories, such as Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You, Morgan Talty’s Night of the Living Rez, Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird, and Robyn Ryle’s Sex of the Midwest, along with occasional essays on craft and form. In addition to our readings, we’ll complete generative exercises and craft experiments constructed to help you explore the forms we are engaging, test their limits and possibilities, and (hopefully!) build the beginnings of a collection that coheres by design rather than by accident. Students will also be responsible for contributing to the class conversation through a short presentation, which might include an exploration of a selected book’s architecture, a mini-lesson on a formal strategy (time, recurrence, motif, place), or a curated reading-and-exercise pairing that the class can use as a springboard for discussion and new work.

7221.001 Disability Theory

R. Godden Th 3:00-5:50 Allen 113

This course will introduce you to Disability Studies and to the study of disability in literature. We will consider varied representations of disability, including physical, cognitive, and sensory impairments. Often viewed merely as moral symbols or instances of sentimentality and pathos, we will explore how figures of disability challenge and interrogate such familiar concepts as normal or human. What do these terms mean? Who decides? We will pay special attention to how disability intersects with gender and race, and we will also examine related concepts, such as monstrosity and posthumanism. Readings will include literary texts and selections from theoretical texts.

7915.001 Teaching College Composition

J. Butts T/Th 10:30-11:50 Allen 212-C

This course serves as the foundational practicum for graduate teaching assistants in the composition program. By bridging composition theory with classroom practice, students will explore diverse pedagogical frameworks and translate them into approaches to teaching that work for different styles. We will engage in the collaborative work of designing courses, crafting assignments, and developing methods that support developing writers. Ultimately, this course fosters a professional community where we collectively navigate the complexities of teaching writing.

7920.002 Comics Studies—An Introduction

B. Costello W 12:30-3:20 Allen 202

This course will introduce graduate students to the burgeoning academic field of comics studies. We will consider the formal properties of comics, the history of the medium and its most common genres (memoir, superheroes, journalism) and formats, the contexts that shape comics’ production and reception of comics, and the ways in which comics studies intersects with fields such as literary studies, gender and sexuality studies, African American studies, et cetera. We will also examine how our understanding of “comics” has been shaped by the evolution of “comics studies” as a field. No prior experience as a reader of comics is necessary.

7930.001 Dissertation Workshop

S. Lal Th 3:00-5:50 Room TBA

This workshop focuses on honing your writing skills so that you can make progress on your PhD dissertation. As a class, we will spend time examining models of academic writing to consider issues of argumentation, methodology, style, and audience. We will also assess our writing processes to find modes of productivity that suit our specific goals and priorities. In addition, we will workshop your works-in-progress so that you can practice the art of giving and incorporating helpful feedback—a vital part of the writing process that will sharpen your argument. In sum, this course will help you strengthen your writing and take your dissertation forward.

7960.001 Elegy and the Elegiac

C. Rovee W 6:30-9:20 Allen 202

This is a course on elegiac form (the elegy proper, along with related forms such as epitaph, eulogy, monody, ode) and elegiac mood (the romantic mood of loss: lyrical, ineffable, melancholic, nostalgic). Readings will take in the long history of elegiac writing, from the ancient world to contemporary writing, but will be centered on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when contention over the form, purpose, and cultural authority of the elegy accompanied the rise to dominance of "lyric" as a literary category defined by an elegiac voice.

7970.001 Genre and 21st century American Fiction

J. Berman W 3:30-6:20 Allen 212-C

This course will interrogate the much celebrated "genre turn" in American fiction by examining texts that elevate genre fiction tropes into the category of literary fiction. Paying particular attention to the historical roots of the genres of the gothic, the bildungsroman, the western, science fiction and sentimental fiction in the American context we will interrogate how cultural and political discourses in the 21st century altered the contours of these genre expressions.

7981.001 Modernism, Gender, and Sexuality

B. Kahan Th 3:00-5:50 Allen 202

This course will introduce students to a range of important British and American modernist texts in order to think about the tensions and frictions between readings that are focused on gender and those that are more focused on sexuality in this period where gender and sexuality were significantly more imbricated. We will query how to hold these readings co-present as we think about the historical, literary, and political stakes of choosing between them. Readings will include authors such as A. C. Swinburne, Sui Sin Far, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Gladys Bentley, Ma Rainey, Bryher, Marianne Moore, and Don C. Talayesva. Students will be expected to do both a presentation and also to write a research paper of 15 pages.