Topics Courses Fall 2026
ENGL 176: First Year Seminar - Trap, Rap & Hip Hop Protest Literature
Instructor: Sarah Ngoh
26362 | TuTh 12:30-1:45 PM | Wescoe 4075
ENGL 203: Topics in Reading and Writing - Rock and Rap Writing
Instructor: Dr. Iain Ellis
27157 | MWF 1:00-1:50 PM | Fraser 222
27158 | MWF 2:00-2:50 PM | Fraser 222
Once dismissed as the inarticulate utterances of adolescents, rock music has emerged into a modern art form, complete with its own industry of written works. 1950s and ‘60s songwriting soon inspired distinct critical analyses and later other subgenres such as rock fiction and musician memoirs. Today, these are all staples of our popular literature. The addition of rap and hip-hop to rock culture in the 1970s expanded the range of rock writings, introducing previously marginalized voices with new rhetorical methods and appeals. The quizzes, analytical and creative essays assigned in this class will revolve around the books, essays, films, videos, and songs we study; and issues of race, class, gender, and generation will all be central to our analyses. In addition, students will be expected to research, write, and present a fully developed research paper that focuses on a rock and/or rap writing of their own choice.
ENGL 203: Topics in Reading and Writing - The Video Game
Instructor: Laura Northup
27159 | TuTh 9:30-10:45 AM | Fraser 222
27160 | TuTh 11:00-12:15 PM | Fraser 222
Traditional definitions of “reading” and “writing” rely on a strict dichotomy: the writer composes the text, and the reader consumes it. However, the interactivity of 21st-century digital media fundamentally alters our positionality to a text, breaking down these established boundaries. In this course, we will use the video game medium as a fruitful space to explore the modern-day blending of “reader” and “writer,” “author” and “audience,” and “player” and “developer.” In order to deconstruct this binary, “Reading and Writing the Video Game” will interrogate what it really means to “read” and “write” in this genre: how do we “read” gameplay, and what is there to be read in the midst of action sequences, simulation, or story? What choices were written into the composition of particular video games that compelled individuals and entire communities into action and discourse? How do fans gather and collaborate to develop the game, both in programming and in discourse, to become “writers” of these games themselves?
Drawing on methodologies from audience, genre, and popular culture studies, we will analyze video games as significant cultural artifacts. Students will identify the generic conventions of different game types to understand how they construct meaning, while simultaneously exploring how diverse audiences consume, critique, and co-create these interactive experiences within the landscape of contemporary popular culture. The video games at the center of this class include Stardew Valley, The Last of Us Part I, Overwatch, Peak, The Sims, and more. We will engage with these games in a variety of ways. Some, like Stardew Valley, you will be asked to purchase; others, like The Last of Us Part I, you will be asked to watch gameplay of; and some, like Overwatch, you will be asked to analyze through texts composed within the community. Coursework will ask you to compose in a variety of genres, bridging traditional academic writing with digital media. Assignments will include weekly progress logs, analytical essays evaluating certain games through various concept lenses, and a final digital project where you will script and produce a “video essay” analyzing a specific game’s community discourse.
English 317: Topics in American Lit to 1865 - Freedom & Bondage in Antebellum American Literature
Instructor: Paul Outka
28045 | MW 2:00-3:15 PM | Wescoe 4076
This course will examine a number of texts written largely before the Civil War that were profoundly concerned with the meanings of freedom—individual, artistic, political, social, sexual, physical, etc.— and the wide variety of difficulties in attaining it. Our reading and discussions will juxipose texts from the so-called “American Renaissance”—a period traditionally defined by the burst of creative work by Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Hawthorne, and others, works deeply concerned with individual freedom, the possibility of orginality, as well as enslavement—with writers who were more focused on the immediate crises of enslavement and abolition, including Harriet Jacobs, Fredrick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and David Walker. This broader context will allow us to view the extraordinary concern with individualism, self-creation, originality, and freedom in the former group through the prism of enslavement, the issue that saturated the period’s political, cultural, and philosophical discourse. Rather than dismissing the canonical texts as simply escapist, or including the less canonical texts as mere variations on the central works, we will read this important literary period as fundamentally intersectional, as a profoundly interrelated series of meditations on freedom and bondage.
ENGL 329: Topics in Forms and Genres- Animals & Literature
Instructor: Phillip Drake
26366 | TuTh 9:30-10:45 AM | Wescoe 4076
This course examines animals in literature along with the emergence of animal studies as a field of inquiry. We will read and analyze a selection of noteworthy texts, allowing us to trace the history of animal studies, while also testing ideas and methods that currently give shape to the field of animal studies today. To this end we will explore various disciplinary (literary, anthropological, biological, ethological, psychological, etc.) and theoretical lineages that animate (and are animated by) animal studies.
Probable Texts: Wells, Island of Dr. Moreau; Ward, Salvage the Bones; Woolf, Flush; Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep; and other literary and critical works that will be posted on Canvas.
ENGL 334: Major Authors- August Wilson
Instructor: Mark Luce
26367 | Th 7:00-10:00 PM | Regnier 354 - Edwards
In a series of 10 plays set in each decade of the 20th century, primarily in Pittsburgh, August Wilson forged a different kind of history. From emancipation to gentrification, from hardscrabble lives to joyous blues, the plays trace the arc of Black life in America. These searing works will stay with you long after the last line is spoken. We will discuss all of Wilson's plays and while exploring music, economics, race, gender, history and the implications of the Great Migration. Students will examine stage and costume designs and watch various productions of the plays.
* This course is taught on the Edwards Campus and satisfies the LLW requirement for Literature or American Literature
ENGL 340: Topics in U.S. Ethnic Literature - Latina/x/o Literature
Instructor: Marta Caminero-Santangelo
28034 | APPT | Online
*This course also satisfies the Edwards Campus LLW requirement for Literature or American Literature.
ENGL 360: Topics in Writing - Writing About Science
Instructor: Doug Crawford-Parker
26268 | TuTh 9:30-10:45 AM | Wescoe 4021
ENGL 360 is a course for anyone who wants to write about science in creative, engaging, and original ways. It’s for creative writers who have an interest in science, for scientists who want to discover distinctive ways to share their understanding, and for anyone else who wants to explore the intersection of writing creatively and science.
The course will emphasize nonfiction and spend some time engaging with the creative genre of the essay along with reading an assortment of science essays for inspiration and examination. Students will write three essays and read the work of their classmates. Course work will also include a revision assignment and a short presentation on a topic of interest to the class.
ENGL 381: Topics in Rhetoric & Composition - Writing for Nonprofits
Instructor: Sean Kamperman
26379 | TuTh 12:30-1:45 PM | Wescoe 4020
This course offers an introduction to the principles of professional communication in nonprofit organizations. Through analyzing the rhetoric of successful nonprofits and investigating case studies, students will learn how to create a range of documents central to the operation of a successful nonprofit—grant proposals, brochures, newsletters, and donor reports, among others. Readings and assignments will emphasize the ethical and rhetorical complexities of nonprofit work and prepare students to engage with a range of audiences, from donors to clients to staff. Students will hone their professional writing and strategic communication skills by undertaking service learning projects on behalf of actual nonprofit organizations. This course is designed equally for students who are interested in nonprofit careers and those who simply want to learn more about how to be an effective communicator in an organizational setting.
ENGL 390: Studies in - Critical Perspectives on AI & Digital Technologies
Instructor: Kathryn Conrad
26267 | TuTh 12:30-1:45 PM | Wescoe 4076
This interdisciplinary course examines digital technologies with a special emphasis on artificial intelligence. Students will learn to critically analyze the development, design, implementation, and global impact of digital technologies using approaches drawn from humanities, social sciences, informatics, and/or law. Topics may include but will not be limited to user interface and user design; the history of computing; safety and regulation; data and privacy; copyright and intellectual property; international labor and the future of work; environmental and infrastructural impacts; algorithmic bias; representations of digital technologies in popular culture; impact on globally marginalized communities, and the question of ethical use. Fulfills Core 34 Global Culture requirement.
ENGL 390: Studies in -Books & the Art of the Conversation
Instructor: Laura Moriarty
26381 | TuTh 11:00-12:15 PM | Wescoe 4020
Michel de Montaigne believed conversation to be the “most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds.” Research shows the art of conversation–not just speaking, but asking good questions and listening–is something we can improve through practice. In this class, we’ll do just that, applying research-backed strategies to improve the quality of our conversations while discussing assigned books, both fiction and nonfiction. We’ll study the skills of professional conversationalists, and each student will regularly “interview” other students in front of the class with the aim of deepening understanding of a reading for everyone. This is a class not necessarily designed for people who are already gifted at, or at ease in, conversation; rather, it’s designed for people who want to improve a skill that will serve them, and the people they meet, for the rest of their lives. But it’s also a class for people who want to talk, and truly engage with their classmates, about books. Students can expect regular reading quizzes, and they must be willing to converse in front of the class in an encouraging and learning-focused atmosphere.
ENGL 530: Irish Literature & Culture - Modern Irish Drama
Instructors: Dr. Zay Dale
26384 | MW 3:30-4:45 PM | Wescoe 4075
In January 1907, following the performance of Irish playwright John Millington Synge’s play The Playboy of the Western World, rioters spread through Dublin arguing that the play was an offense to public morals and an insult against Ireland. Across the Atlantic a few years later, the cast of the same play were arrested at a production in Philadelphia. From this, a few important questions arise: How can theater function as both a cultural nationalist project and an international artistic movement at the same time, and what tensions arise from that dual role? How did Irish dramatists both respond to and influence international developments in twentieth-century theater, particularly in relation to evolving ideas about gender, sexuality, and the body in performance? In this course, we will study the Irish dramatic revival in the twentieth-century within both its national and international frameworks. While investigating the relationship between the major Irish revival dramatists and the Irish cultural and national politics that so often shaped their plays' reception in Ireland, we will look at how Irish playwrights responded and contributed to international developments in twentieth-century theater. May be repeated for credit as the topic changes. Prerequisite: Prior completion of at least one 300- or 400-level English course.
ENGL 570: Topics in American Literature - Literature of the American Revolution
Instructor: Laura Mielke & Randall Fuller
26388 | MW 2:00-3:15 PM | Wescoe 4020
250 years ago, the Declaration of Independence was composed, signed, published, and read aloud across the North American colonies and beyond. In this course, we will closely study the Declaration as a work of literary as well as political import and take up a range of contemporary texts that inspired or were inspired by the Declaration. As we read, we will ask: What does it mean to write and speak a nation into being? How has the Declaration been interpreted, by whom, and why? What impact has the interpretation of the Declaration—and in particular, its insistence that “all men are created equal”—had on national culture (as well as politics)? Ultimately, we will not only look at the intellectual and social contexts from which the Declaration arose, but also the ways in which the Revolutionary Era speaks to us now.
ENGL 598: Honors Proseminar- The Gothic
Instructor: Ann Rowland
26390 | TuTh 2:00-3:15 PM | Wescoe 4020
Why do we read and watch what terrifies us? What are the pleasures of fear? The Gothic tradition has provided the modern age with its most compelling images and most haunting architecture of fear. This course will explore and define the Gothic tradition in British and American literature from its beginnings in the late eighteenth century to more recent twentieth-century texts in literature and film. The Uncanny. Doubles. Live Burial. Life after/in Death. Haunted Houses. Incest. Infanticide. Parricide. The Past. These are Gothic’s major tropes of terror. We will examine how these figures came together to form the conventions of Gothic literature and why these conventions have proven so persistent.
