Graduate Courses Spring 2026
ENGL 714: Medieval Literature: Fantasy and Imagination
Instructor: Misty Schieberle
56900 | TuTh 11:00 AM- 12:15 PM | Wescoe 3001A
Popular culture has embraced the medieval – from Tolkien’s novels and Game of Thrones to the recent A24 adaptation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. What important medieval works, literary tropes, and cultural attitudes underpin these adaptations and creative mash-ups – and how do they still resonate for modern audiences? To answer that question, we will explore some of the “greatest hits” of the later Middle Ages: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; selections from Chaucer and Christine de Pizan; selections of Arthurian works, especially Malory’s Morte D’Arthur; and other popular works, including a werewolf story and short romances. This course will not only provide students with the chance to read popular and sometimes surprisingly modern medieval works but also prepare them for future teaching opportunities, presentations of research, and explorations of continuities among the medieval and later periods. We will consider manuscript studies and a variety of theoretical perspectives to help students develop a broad sense of the methodologies useful in studying medieval literature.
This is an introductory course. No prior knowledge of medieval English is expected, and some texts will have translations available. Our goal is for you to leave the course with a strong sense of major late medieval literary works and practical methods for studying them.
Requirements: careful reading of all assigned texts; participation in seminar discussions and class activities; a short close reading essay (5-7 pages); a short presentation; and a 12-15 page researched essay. Students are encouraged to pursue their own scholarly interests in designing the final researched project, which must include text(s) from our course but may also address post-medieval adaptations.
ENGL 790: Studies in: Reading Novels for Craft
Instructor: Laura Moriarty
55815 | TuTh 2:00-3:15 PM | Wescoe 3001A
In this course, we’ll read several novels, mostly contemporary, that have enjoyed critical and/or commercial success, and we’ll try to analyze what made them successful. We’ll read these novels as novelists, paying attention to their structures, narrative devices, story arcs, and techniques that might be useful in our own work. We’ll look at what the opening chapters accomplish, and how each author keeps the reader engaged through a novel’s middle and end. We’ll take novel-writing axioms (e.g. “The protagonist has to want something, and want it badly.”) and see if they hold up against real novels. Each student will write short papers and give presentations over the course of the semester.
ENGL 790: Studies in: The British Novel to 1850
Instructor: Anna Neill
56729 | M 2:00-4:30 PM | Wescoe 3001A
If you enjoy reading or writing true crime, fantasy, horror, comedy, or romantic drama, then you are already interested in the history of the novel. From 17th-century romance to the “social problem” fictions of the 19th century, novels catered to their readers’ longing for adventure and mystery, their desire for social justice, their pleasure in seeing virtue rewarded with love, and the thrill of being transported vicariously to another world. In depicting the desires, terrors, and sensational fortunes or misfortunes of their characters, novels dramatized the historical forces that shaped these lives and those of their readers. Novels could be complicit with structural inequities and abuses, but they could also invite criticism of the social and political forces engendering cruelty or injustice.
We will read eight novels in this course, covering multiple genres that include romance, realism, Gothic, sentimentalism and social satire. We will discuss how each work reflects, intentionally or otherwise, the historical realities from which it arises. And we will consider how novelistic forms impact our understanding of the worlds they create. To that end, we will also tackle a variety of readings that theorize or contextualize the history of novel forms. Our primary texts will be Oroonoko, Moll Flanders, The Castle of Otranto, Evelina, Northanger Abbey, Ivanhoe, Wuthering Heights, and Oliver Twist. Students will write three conference-length papers and give regular short presentations in class.
ENGL 790: Studies in: Programming for Digital Humanities
Instructor: Wen Xin
56808 | TuTh 12:30-1:45 PM | Wescoe 4075
New methods in Digital Humanities (or DH) have enabled us to engage with a far larger collection of texts and uncover more nuanced patterns than traditional approaches, such as close reading and human analysis, typically permit. This course will introduce humanities students to the foundational skills of computational text analysis, a core component of DH, in the R programming language. We will begin by learning the fundamentals of programming and data management in the R programming language. The course will then examine micro-level textual analyses—such as n-gram frequency, lexical richness, dispersion, and keyword-in-context (KWIC)—as well as macro-level techniques including term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), sentiment analysis, topic modeling, word embeddings, and bibliometric analysis. Throughout the course, we will also emphasize text visualization as a key practice for interpreting and presenting results across methods. This course will expand your suite of skills as you pursue humanities questions. You will be expected to complete assignments that exercise in-class instructions, a group project where you work with your group members to plan, execute, and report your textual analysis, as well as a critical reflection upon computational textual analysis. No prior technical skills are expected in this course. We will start with the very basics of programming. Bring your laptops!
ENGL 800: Methods, Theory & Professionalism
Instructor: Kathryn Conrad
44240 | W 2:00-4:30 PM | Wescoe 3001A
English 800 prepares students for graduate coursework and exams, the writing of a scholarly thesis or dissertation, and the submission of work to the larger scholarly community. Assignments facilitate the acquisition of skills and tools essential to these activities. Across the Fall and Spring semesters, students will acquire strategies for reading scholarly writing; produce a range of professional genres, including conference proposals; learn more about their selected areas of study and the best venues for sharing work in those areas; and develop a comprehensive plan for their graduate studies. In the Spring semester, in addition to continuing our exploration of methods, we will learn about research resources in English Studies, practice writing conference abstracts, conduct more research on areas of scholarly focus, and further develop individual academic plans.
ENGL 801: Study and Teaching of Writing
Instructor: Sonya Lancaster
50344 | Th 10:00- 10:50 AM | Fraser 113
This one-hour practicum is designed to support your teaching of English 102 at KU and to provide a space for discussing and sharing pedagogical approaches with your fellow teachers. The course builds upon your first semester 801 experience, emphasizing “best practices” for teaching inquiry, research, analysis and synthesis. We will work together to address issues that arise as you teach, developing a community of colleagues with whom to share teaching materials and support. Class sessions (once per week) will focus on discussion of pedagogical topics related to your teaching of 102 and incorporating DEIJB principles into the class, as well as workshops in which you will collaboratively create individual assignments and time to work through issues that arise in your classes. You will continue to develop the teaching portfolio you designed in 801, in addition to completing two short projects, each of which is directly related to your teaching (one based on peer class visits and the other based on creating and revising activities and the writing project assignments for the next time you teach)
ENGL 880: Topics in Composition Studies and Rhetoric: Composing Disability
Instructor: Sean Kamperman
55816 | TuTh 12:30-1:45 PM | Wescoe 3001A
This course offers an examination of rhetoric and composition theory, pedagogy, and practice through the lens of disability studies. We will consider the myriad ways writers make meaning about, or compose, disability; the influence of the disability rights movement on contemporary writing practices and technologies; and the implications of disabled epistemologies and knowing-making for the future of the field. For their final projects, students will have the option of composing a traditional research paper in their area of study, a born-digital project (scholarly or applied), or a pedagogical resource such as a syllabus, course module, or program of study. Prerequisite: ENGL 780 or equivalent.
ENGL 908: Seminar in Literary Criticism: Indigenous Intellectual and Book History
Instructor: Robert Warrior
56493 | W 11:00 AM -1:30 PM | Wescoe 3001A
