Topics Courses Fall 2025
ENGL 203: Topics in Reading & Writing: African American Women's Coming of Age Stories
Instructor: Jade Harrison
27078 | TuTh 11:00-12:15 PM | Fraser 206
27079 | TuTh 12:30-1:45 PM | Fraser 208
For decades, African American coming-of-age narratives have amplified critical explorations of identity, self-discovery, and lived experience in the U.S. This course offers an introduction to women’s fictional coming-of-age narratives during the 21st century, drawing from the writings of contemporary authors including Z.Z. Packer, Angie Thomas, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Brit Bennett, and Jacqueline Woodson. It examines how women writers negotiate concepts such as community, belonging, and individualism to illustrate how children, teenagers, and young adults navigate both physical and digital spaces to create their own unique identities and achieve self-understanding, while facing personal challenges and societal pressures. We will explore how stories centering on adolescence and young adulthood foster a critical, in-depth understanding of concepts like social advocacy, the power of voice, healing, and community-building in the contemporary moment. Required coursework consists in-class assignments (reading responses and group discussions), three essays, and a final revision project.
ENGL 203: Topics in Reading & Writing: Professional Communication
Instructor: Sarah Thornsberry
24995 | By Appointment | Online (8-week)
24997 | By Appointment | Online (8-week)
ENGL 203: Topics in Reading & Writing Literature of Sports
Instructor: Philip Wedge
15313 | By Appointment | Online (8-week)
26514 | By Appointment | Online (8-week)
In the Literature of Sports course students will study and write essays on a significant body of sport literature, examining such topics as sports as character-building, sports hero types, hero- worship in fans, violence in sports, corruption in sports, the translation of sport literature to film, and so on. Required coursework consists of 3 major Essays and a revision assignment (50%), and a comprehensive Final (20%). Homework (30%) includes group work and short writing assignments. Class participation is also of considerable importance. TEXTS: Eric Greenberg, 'The Celebrant;' Clifford Odets, 'Golden Boy;' Angie Abdou, 'The Bone Cage;' Anne Lamott, 'Crooked Little Heart;' August Wilson, 'Fences;' F.X. Toole, 'Million Dollar Baby;' H.G. Bissinger, 'Friday Night Lights.'
ENGL 205: Freshman-Sophomore Honors Proseminar: Haunted Literature
Instructor: Colleen Morrissey
27604 | MWF 10:00-10:50 AM | Wescoe 4023
In this course, we will examine the literature that haunts us. We will explore the concept of literary “horror”—what purposes it serves, what truths it exposes, what rules it breaks. We will read and analyze haunted genres such as erasure, surrealism, and the Gothic. Through our study of haunted literature, students will build their critical thinking, reading, research, and writing skills, learning to uncover the ways that literature, culture, and history co-define each other. Most importantly, students will explore how the written word—both others’ and their own—is a powerful force for creating and capturing even the most uncomfortable human realities. We will also examine how other media—film, graphic art, etc.—interact with literature to create haunting art. Class meetings will emphasize discussion while coursework will emphasize critical writing. Texts will include fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from writers such as Helen Oyeyemi, Emily Brontë, and Shirley Jackson.
ENGL 205: Freshman-Sophomore Honors Proseminar: Myth & Adaptation
Instructor: Sarah Van der Laan
27605 | TuTh 9:30-10:45 AM | Wescoe 4021
A victorious hero, cast adrift on uncharted seas on his return from a cataclysmic war, struggles through unimaginable dangers and powerful temptations to return to the wife and home he left twenty years ago. The Odyssey—one of the oldest surviving works of European literature—continues to inspire films, plays, novels, graphic novels, poetry, and art: war stories and love stories, postcolonial and feminist revisions, parodies and tragedies. We will study the Odyssey and three contemporary adaptations—Caribbean poet Derek Walcott's stage adaptation, the Coen brothers' film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and Madeline Miller's recent novel Circe—and examine the nature of adaptation itself through critical and theoretical readings. We will ask why Homer’s tales of Troy, with their questioning of ideals of honor and glory, their awareness of the human cost of warfare, and their struggle to find heroism in human experience, remain necessary today. We will discover how contemporary authors and directors reinvent myths for new audiences, and how they insist on the social and cultural power of storytelling. Students will engage in class discussion, write critical papers, and have the opportunity to create their own adaptation.
ENGL 334: Major Authors: Jane Austen & Thomas Hardy
Instructor: Philip Wedge
26522 | TuTh 12:30-1:45 PM | Wescoe 4023 – Lawrence
This course offers the opportunity to study two major 19th century British authors, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, who helped shape the novel as a form. We will read three major novels from each author and study the issues they explore, from the roles of women in society, to social class issues, to the evolution and potential demise of rural life; from modes of genteel courtship to the struggle to rise out of the laboring class. In the process we will also examine the evolution of the novel as a form from 3-volume edition to serialization and beyond. Required coursework consists of 3 major Essays (60%) and a comprehensive Final Exam (25%). Homework (15%) includes pop quizzes and short writing assignments. Class participation is also of considerable importance. TEXTS: Austen, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion; Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
ENGL 334: Major Authors: Colson Whitehead & Daniel Woodrell
Instructor: Mark Luce
26523 | Th 7:10-10:00 PM | Regnier 354 (Edwards)
ENGL 360: Topics in: Writing and Ecology
Instructor: Megan Kaminski
27967 | M 9:00-11:30 AM | Malott 3022
This course explores writing as a practice to encounter, engage with, and explore the larger ecologies of which we are a part. Our writing and reading practices will help us connect to our shared ecosystem as a source of knowledge and inspiration. More specifically, the class will focus on writing that counters extractive and exploitative values and relationships with land and peoples. Assigned readings will range in genre, including nonfiction, poetry, speculative fiction, and science writing. While our reading list and collective investigations will be collaborative, students will carve out their own research paths and explorations in this project-based class. This course is cross-listed with EVRN 307 and 507.
ENGL 390: Studies in: Romance Fiction as the Practice of Freedom
Instructor: Hannah Scupham
27441 | TuTh 2:00-3:15 PM | Wescoe 4023 - Lawrence
Often maligned and misunderstood, popular romance fiction is both a best-selling and under-studied genre. In this course, we will explore the wide, wild, and wonderful world of the romance novels and its critical reception by scholars and readers alike with an emphasis on gender, race, sexuality, and disability. Our course begins with the bodice rippers of 1980s and 1990s and the early scholarship/critiques of the genre. We will then shift to discussing how romance media from the past 20 years depicts dating/relationships, pleasure, agency, joy, and readership. In our final unit, we will examine current trends in romance, readership, and publishing, including BookTok, Bookstagram, dark romances, the emergent New Adult genre, and fanfiction, just to name a few. Whether you’re a romance lover or a romance hater, this course is for you. Looking forward to exploring the delightful world of popular romance with you!
ENGL 390: Studies in: Supergods: Religion & Comics
Instructor: Samuel Brody (Religious Studies)
27920 | TuTh 11:00-12:15 PM | Learned 2115 - Lawrence
This course will explore the idea that comic books are a unique art form capable of expressing ideas in ways that prose, poetry, and film cannot. These include religious ideas, and the history of comics are full of examples of powerful religious and anti-religious ideas from around the world. Topics may include: how to read comics as literature, examples of comics dealing with major issues and ideas in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and traditional Native American religions, and the relationships between superheroes and gods. This course is crosslisted with REL 290.
ENGL 521: Advanced Topics in British Literature Before 1800: Heroes, Gods, & Rebels
Instructor: Sarah Van der Laan
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 580: Rhetoric & Writing: 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: Studies in: Black Bodies in British Literature
Instructor: Zay Dale
27440 | 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 Literature: 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.
