Capstone Courses Fall 2025
ENGL 507: Science, Technology & Society, Examining the Future through a Science-Fiction Lens
Instructor: Phillip Drake
26553 | TuTh 9:30-10:45 AM | Wescoe 4020
This course examines technoscientific presents and futures through close readings of science fiction and nonfiction texts. Our inquiries explore a range of social issues, including questions about scientific beliefs and practices, economic enterprise, colonialism/globalization, bodies/identities, ecological futures, utopia/dystopia, what it means to be a person, and more. Assignments will include papers, presentations, exams, and several informal reaction papers. The broader goal of the course is to foster the critical tools and perspectives that enable us to better conduct ourselves as actors in our respective social, ecological, and technological communities. Likely texts include: H.G. Wells, The Time Machine; George Schuyler, Black No More; Karl Capek, RUR; Ursula Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest; William Gibson, Neuromancer; Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake; and a number of short stories and critical works that will be available on Canvas.
ENGL 521: Epic: Heroes, Gods, & Rebels
Instructor: Sarah Van der Laan
26553 | TuTh 9:30-10:45 AM | Wescoe 4020
25866 | TuTh 12:30-1:45 PM | Wescoe 1009
Epic has lain at the heart of the European literary tradition for twenty-seven hundred years. The most prestigious and the most ambitious of literary genres, epic explores human nature, promotes and questions political ideals and social principles, defines nations and communities, and examines the nature of heroism. Through stories of human heroism and super-human adventures, epic poems ask what it means to be human, how to find meaning in mortality, and how to live within—or overturn—power structures and the rulers who manipulate them. Epic endures because it offers its readers tools for living. In this class, we will encounter four of the greatest European epic poems, culminating in the greatest English epic: Homer's Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, Dante's Inferno, and Milton's Paradise Lost.
ENGL 551: Fiction Writing II: Realistic Fiction
Instructor: Laura Moriarty
24850 | TuTh 11:00-12:15 PM | Wescoe 4037
20355 | TuTh 2:00-3:15 PM | Wescoe 4020
(Prerequisite: Eng 351) At least half of class meetings will be devoted to workshopping student fiction. We’ll also read published realistic fiction and analyze the strategies each writer uses to engage the reader. In addition to creative assignments, students can expect regular reading quizzes. Satisfies: Goal 1 Outcome 1 (GE1.1); Goal 2 Outcome 1 (GE2.1); Goal 3 Arts and Humanities (GE3H); H Humanities (H).
ENGL 552: Poetry Writing II
Instructor: JJ Harrington
24455 | TuTh 2:00-3:15 PM | Wescoe 1009
This workshop is based on the idea that to be a good writer, you have to write a lot and read a lot. So, we’ll all be doing both. We will read a lot of the work of student poets in the class (i.e., you), as well as poems by contemporary published poets who aren’t in the class. You’ll be required to compose a poem most weeks and to submit it to other members of the class. We’ll take different approaches over the course of the semester, to see what a poem is doing and to suggest ways the author might take it in new and exciting directions. We’ll also visit with some experienced published poets. My philosophy: all poetry, regardless of subject-matter, is about words, and words are sounds + silences or marks on a page + blank space. We get to make imaginative compositions out of those sounds, marks, and space, and doing so can be a lot of fun. We will think about your poetry, not simply as a group of individual poems, but as a growing (and changing) body of work. We’ll also get into the habit of thinking about poetry as auditory and visual, not “purely” textual, art.
Instructor: Brian Daldorph
20163 | M 5:30-8:20 PM | Regnier 256 (Edwards)
ENGL 580: Rhetorics and Politics of Horror
Instructor: Pritha Prasad
24457 | MW 3:30-4:45 PM WES 4021
In this seminar, we will discuss and interrogate the ways horror has been used in film and television to forward political and cultural commentary, particularly surrounding identity and power (i.e. race, gender, class, nation, and dis/ability). We will cover a range of historical and contemporary examples of horror film and television, focusing specifically on subgenres like racial horror, feminist horror, body horror, and psychological horror. We will supplement and contextualize our analyses of these texts with interdisciplinary readings from film and media studies, rhetorical criticism, critical race theory, feminist and queer studies, and popular culture studies. What makes something “scary,” and how might dominant fears and anxieties be underpinned by gendered, racialized, sexualized, and/or ableist cultural narratives? As a genre that uniquely relies upon the creative, multimodal use of visual, aural, spoken, and textual elements, what kinds of “arguments” does horror make about culture, politics, society, and history? Throughout the semester, students will be required to complete regular reading and viewing assignments, as well as a series of writing assignments, including a final analytical research paper.
ENGL 590: Black Bodies in British Literature
Instructor: Zay Dale
27666 | MW 2:00-3:15 PM | Wescoe 1003
This course examines how Black bodies are represented and understood in British literature from their early presence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to their presence in the twentieth century. We will explore how the physicality of Blackness shapes and challenges the British literary tradition by raising important questions about race, culture, identity, and social-political exclusions tied to Black bodies. Half of our class takes place pre-1850s to analyze how Black bodies disrupt the existing social and cultural order of British identity. We will study Blackness as both a racial category and as a cultural rupture of the traditional boundaries of subjectivity. This class will then move to Modernism to focus on how Black bodies and Blackness continue to challenge and reshape British literature. By analyzing these two moments, this course examines how Black bodies and Blackness inform and transform British literary aesthetics. The final research paper for this course will involve analyzing literary, archival, and historical texts to explore new perspectives on the role of Black bodies in British literature from the sixteenth century to the Modernist era.
ENGL 598: Honors Proseminar: Setting the Stage - Contemporary Drama
Instructor: Darren Canady
20189 | TuTh 2:00-3:15 PM | Wescoe 4037
Theatres and theatre-companies everywhere engage in a nearly year-round process of reading scripts, meeting playwrights, engaging audiences, and refining their mission statements as they work towards building theatrical seasons that invigorate spectators and keep theatre fresh and vital. In this class, students will explore recent scripts premiering at stages around the country to get a sense of what stories theatres are finding compelling, how scripts are analyzed for production, and how contemporary drama is reflecting the society in which they live. The semester will culminate in a project in which students form theatre companies and program and present a season of their own design.
ENGL 655: Victorian Fantasy
Instructor: Anna Neill
26555 | By appointment | Online
The Victorians invented fantasy. They recovered and rewrote folk tales and medieval stories. They reenchanted weary modern lives with tales of fairies and goblins. They imagined marvelous new lands whose indigenous peoples could be brutally conquered. They mixed magical thinking with evolutionary science to create improbable beings or to predict outlandish planetary futures. And they imagined utopian possibilities that drew on the conventions of romance. Over the semester we will read a wide range of fantastic Victorian stories, considering how they reflect and comment on contemporary science, industrial capitalism, imperialism, and the many cultural upheavals caused by revolutions in technology and commerce. These writers are the precursors of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling. If you love these 20th-century fantasy classics, you will enjoy learning about the stories, the histories, and the conflicted visions of past present and future worlds that the Victorians tried to navigate with the help of romance, myth, and magic. Texts: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King; Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market; Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies; George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin; Marie Corelli, A Romance of Two Worlds;; H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines; William Morris, News from Nowhere.
