English

George Orwell once wrote that "many people who would consider themselves extremely sophisticated and “advanced” are actually carrying through life an imaginative background which they acquired in childhood." This course examines the political lessons children’s books encode about what childhood is, and about which children matter and why. Students read children’s texts from a range of genres and forms – including fantasy, school stories, picture books, and domestic fiction – written between the late 18th century and the present day. Key focuses include agency, gender, race, class, and the environment. 

This course looks at various candidates for the "Great American Novel," a term for fictional narratives that seem to capture the essence of the United States. The course examines the concept's origins following the American Civil War, evolution throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, and enduring appeal in the popular imagination. Selected fiction is considered in relation to US national identity, the ideal of the American dream, notions of authorship, and anxieties toward social issues such as class, gender, race, ethnicity, disability, and sexual orientation.

This course examines how British literature from the 1980s is already full of ghosts, specters, and pasts that destabilize any secure sense of present or future. In the first section, students read the novel Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd (1985) as well as parts of the graphic novel From Hell by Eddie Campbell and Alan Moore (1989-1998). They then move on to Jeanette Winterson’s novel Sexing the Cherry (1989), analyzing the feminist potential of (re)turning to nonlinear histories. In the final section of the class, students examine how selected Black British poetry, and the film Twilight City (1989) conjure the violent specter of the British Empire as always already all-too-present. The course has a distinct focus on improving close reading skills and developing methods to approach theory productively. Along with British Cultural Critic Mark Fisher’s and Jacques Derrida’s concepts of hauntology, students build a theoretical toolkit that includes work on historiographic metafiction and the spatial turn. Additionally, the course draws on trauma theory, queer temporality and phenomenology, as well as Afrofuturist and Afropessimist writing.

This course focuses on building English writing skills for natural science students. Students participate in various academic English writing activities that focus on the composition of texts, logical development, professional vocabulary selection, academic research, citation, and bibliography to cultivate academic English writing skills in natural sciences fields.  

Made from the stuff of dreams and nightmares, "the fantastic" in literature poses questions about the nature of reality in a changing world. As science transformed understanding of life in the 18th and 19th centuries, literature placed fears and hopes for the future alongside the oldest beliefs and superstitions, creating a new genre of the fantastic, a modern world of monsters and phantoms where nothing is quite what it seems. This course explores the development of the supernatural and fantastic in European literature from fairytales to science fiction, and examines contemporary resonances, including the enduring appeal of a Hollywood monster and a cult internet meme.

The Early Modern period in England – by which we mean, very roughly, 1550-1660 – was a time of immense intellectual, geographical and literary expansion. The period offers us a double perspective: looking back to classical learning and achievement and using that as a model for the present, and offering us a glance forward to what we now think of as ‘the modern’ – that is, modern subjectivities, sexualities, politics and cultures. This course is designed to introduce texts from a period that stretched from the reign of Henry VIII to the English Civil War, with a focus on the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. The course tracks the creative intersection of individual writers, literary forms, and the spirit of the age, and opens up a set of new magnificent texts for students to immerse themselves in, through which they develop a sense of the culture out of which they emerged. The primary texts studied in this course are chosen to reflect a broad generic range typical of the Renaissance, including prose, drama, masque and lyric and epic poetry.  

This course explores the significance of James Joyce's epic novel Ulysses and places it in its historical and cultural context. The course begins with two classes considering Joyce's work before its publication (specifically Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). The remaining eight weeks are devoted entirely to Ulysses. Through this study students will gain an awareness of the work's significance within the critical discourses of modernism and realism. The course assumes no prior knowledge of Irish history or culture but students will be expected to engage with these contexts as the module progresses. Recommended reading will be made available before each seminar.

The ability to communicate scientific information well is important if one is to disseminate scientific ideas clearly and accurately. Scientific communication involves more than just writing. It also involves the ability to read, analyze, understand, and critique scientific subject matter in a knowing way, at an appropriate depth and breadth, and with an appropriate style for an intended audience. Within this broad context, this course guides students through writing a scientific research paper, as applied to the physical sciences, for an audience of their peers. Students write about one real physical phenomenon such as one of Hooke’s law, Torricelli’s law, projectile motion, the behavior of a pendulum, or some other suitable phenomenon. Such investigation is supported by simulations and/or practical experiments.

This course explores the thrilling and cataclysmic changes of the 17th century through the prism of poetry. As England came to grips with a fundamental change in the national religion; saw civil war pitting neighbor against neighbor and family against family; witnessed a steep rise in women authors and the emergence of modern science, the country’s values were challenged, overturned and re-formed. The course explore how poets responded to these intense changes. The course explores a wide range of writers, from John Milton and Aphra Behn to Aemilia Lanyer and Robert Hooke. Students analyze the brilliant wit, rich imagery, and evocative forms of the period’s poems and ask what they tell us about the historical conditions of their production, and vice versa. Does political poetry have a particular style? Can poetry propel revolution as well as respond to it? Students investigate the models that poets called upon to write about these unprecedented events. 

This course explores the viability of the Afro-Gothic as a distinctive sub-genre of the postcolonial Gothic. It seeks to answer the question "What is the Afro-Gothic?" through a historicization of the concept Gothic in relation to narratives about, and by, continental and diasporic Africans. In the postcolonial Gothic, the classic tropes of the Gothic—incarceration within labyrinthine structures, tyrannical patriarchs, histories of hidden brutalities, suppressed and deadly secrets, haunting by the past oppressed and abused, and appearances of ghosts and other un-dead figures—are appropriated to exposes legacies of colonial trauma. Our more focused inquiry stems from the peculiar racialization of the Gothic during the 19th century, when Gothic darkness became increasingly associated with African blackness.