Fall Term Schedule for Graduate Courses
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Fall 2026
| Number | Title | Instructor | Time |
|---|
|
ENGL 405-02
Donatella Stocchi-Perucchio
MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM
|
|
The first of a two-course sequence, this class approaches The Divine Comedy both as a poetic masterpiece and as an encyclopedia of medieval culture. Through close textual analysis of Inferno and the first half of Purgatorio, students learn to approach Dante’s poetry as a vehicle for thought, an instrument of self-discovery, and a means to understand and engage with historical reality. The course also provides insight into Biblical, Christian, and Classical traditions as they intersect with Dante’s wide-ranging concerns, spanning literature, history, politics, government, philosophy, and theology. A visual component, including illustrations of the Comedy and other artworks related to the narrative, complements the study of the text. Classes combine lectures, discussion, and a weekly recitation session, with intensive participation strongly encouraged. Dante I may be taken independently of Dante II. No prerequisites; freshmen are welcome. Part of the Dante Humanities Cluster.
|
|
ENGL 406-01
Sarah Higley
TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM
|
|
Varying topics relating to the literature and culture of the Middle Ages. The properties of letters and numbers have been associated with the occult from ancient times on. This course will explore the creative development of this concept from Greek and Hebrew thought in medieval and early modern traditions where language served to hide, protect, conjure, and transform: the letters of the Paternoster that defeat the devil, Odin’s Mead of Poetry, Taliesin’s aretalogies, Germanic runes, riddles, charms, loricae, spells, ciphers (the indecipherable Voynich Manuscript, the banned Steganography by Trithemius of Sponheim), magic and foreign alphabets, deific languages (the Irish “Evernew Tongue”), glossolalia, demonic languages, invented languages (Hildegard of Bingen’s Lingua Ignota), John Dee’s “language of the angels,” Enochian,” adopted by Aleister Crowley for his “Order of the Golden Dawn.” I want to discover what properties in language do more than just signify. Exercises, creative projects, and a final research paper.
|
|
ENGL 437-01
Erik Larsen
R 2:00PM - 4:30PM
|
|
Throughout much of modern medical and cultural history, bodily difference has been categorized as disability—as a problematic deviation from standards of normalcy and health. This legacy has been fiercely debated and contested in recent years, with much disagreement about the category’s usefulness in medical contexts and beyond. This course will explore different perspectives on disability through works of modern culture, and primarily through literature, television, and film. We will investigate the traditional medical model of disability, and explore what changing understandings of disability mean for the future of healthcare and the relationship between healthcare providers and patients. The course is writing-intensive, and requires students to share and workshop their papers with peers.
|
|
ENGL 442-01
Gregory Heyworth
MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM
|
|
Varying topics tracing themes, ideas, or figures beyond the limits of any single historical period. Please see public notes for specific section titles and course descriptions. This topics course can be repeated (2 times) for additional credit as long as the special topic (section title) is different. Image, Text and Technology is an interdisciplinary course in the history of the book as a textual and visual medium, an artistic object, and a technology of communication. We will treat this history not merely in the classroom, but participate in it through a series of hands-on projects. Beginning with Aristotle’s insight that we think in images, we will consider writing as bound up in a theoretical relationship with seeing (aesthetics), perceiving (phenomenology, vision, cognitive science), and historically with technologies of dissemination, both analog and digital (manuscripts, printing, photography, television, the internet). We will explore the limits and conjunctions of visual and verbal media through theoretical and scientific readings in Plato, Lessing, Benjamin, Derrida, and McLuhan, and primary texts including the Bible, the Popol Vuh, and the Precepts of Ptah Hotep.
|
|
ENGL 447-01
–
MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM
|
|
With recent advances in artificial intelligence, space exploration, and molecular biology—as well as a variety of social, health, and environmental crises—life in the 21st-century is increasingly Science Fiction-like. Moreover, mainstream contemporary literature increasingly draws from Science Fiction for formal innovations and thematic insights. This course focuses on the Science Fiction short story to introduce students to the history and diversity of this genre, including European literary antecedents, early 20th-century pulp fiction, the Golden Age, the New Wave, cyberpunk, Afrofuturism, and beyond. The course also features works of cultural criticism that demonstrate how the genre has addressed, often in advance, a variety of real-world topics. Course requirements include periodic one-page Reading Responses, an in-class presentation, and a formal paper, as well as class attendance and participation.
|
|
ENGL 462-01
Andrew Korn
TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM
|
|
This course explores three of Italy’s most prominent post-WWII directors, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Liliana Cavani, who developed distinct cinemas and contributed radical representations to key cultural debates. Students will examine each filmmaker’s specific thematic and stylistic innovations, such as Fellini’s carnivalesque and dreamlike states, Antonioni’s use of space and color, and Cavani’s marginal figures and use of flashback. Students will also compare how their works address three of postwar Italy’s and the West’s most critical questions: modernization, the 1968 student protests and the legacy of Fascism. Films include: Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Amarcord; Antonioni’s Red Desert and Zabriskie Point; and Cavani’s The Cannibals and The Night Porter. Assignments include: historical, biographical and critical readings, film screenings, short papers and a final essay. Readings will be in English and films will be shown with English subtitles.
|
|
ENGL 466-01
Brady Fletcher
TR 9:40AM - 10:55AM
|
|
Topics in the study of film. Please see public notes for specific section titles and course descriptions. This topics course can be repeated (2 times) for additional credit as long as the special topic (section title) is different. Cinemas and screens have been home to some of the most impactful representations of disaster, both fictional and non-fictional, for more than a century. From alien invasion, to nuclear detonation, to so-called "natural disasters," there are countless examples of films and television as texts where cultural anxieties about social, political, and ecological change have manifested again and again. This course will examine this broad tradition of representations of danger and destruction - from classic disaster cinema fare like Earthquake (Mark Robson, 1974) and Deluge (Felix E. Feist, 1933), to more experimental works like La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962) and Lessons of Darkness (Werner Herzog, 1992), to recent films like Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011), Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013) and The Wandering Earth (Frant Gwo, 2019) - in the hopes of better understanding their history as aesthetic objects and technological achievements, as well as their cultural significance. We will also take the opportunity to question the very meaning of "disaster," often figured in images of spectacular violence but also intelligible in examples of less visible forms of violence like toxic contamination or even economic disaster. Ultimately we will reflect on the cultural and political stakes of disaster cinema in an era of ongoing social and ecological crisis.
|
|
ENGL 469-01
Jeff Stoiber
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
Restricted to Selznick Students
|
|
ENGL 470-01
Jeff Stoiber
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
Restricted to Selznick Students
|
|
ENGL 471-01
Jeff Stoiber
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
Restricted to Selznick Students
|
|
ENGL 475-1
Stephen Schottenfeld
M 2:00PM - 4:40PM
|
|
This workshop is for advanced fiction writers who have completed ENG 121 or have permission from the instructor. The course emphasizes the development of each student's individual style and imagination, as well as the practical and technical concerns of a fiction writer's craft. Readings will be drawn from a wide variety of modern and contemporary writers. Students will be expected to write three original short stories as well as to revise extensively in order to explore the full range of the story's potential. Applicable English Cluster: Creative Writing.
|
|
ENGL 478-01
Joanna Scott
T 2:00PM - 4:40PM
|
|
Read short stories by contemporary writers along with fiction by the students in the workshop, and discuss ways writers can sharpen the conversation between text and reader. Also consider editing and reviewing techniques. Students expected to write and revise at least three original stories or three sections of a longer work of fiction.
|
|
ENGL 479-01
Jennifer Grotz
T 2:00PM - 4:40PM
|
|
Poems, as William Carlos Williams once said, are machines made out of words, and in this advanced poetry workshop we will work on making the most gorgeous, gripping, and efficient machines possible. To that end, we will read both one another's poems and poems by established authors, in either case paying attention to the ways in which the authors harness aspects of their medium, the English language: syntax, diction, rhythm. The poems we write may take any shape, any form, but we will work towards understanding why a particular poem must take the shape it has; we will pay attention not so much to what the poems say as to how they say it. Requirements: weekly writing and reading assignments, revisions of assignments, devoted participation in class discussions, a final project.
|
|
ENGL 487-04
Rachel O'Donnell
M 2:00PM - 4:40PM
|
|
This course introduces students to the theoretical foundations, practical challenges, and creative possibilities of literary translation. We will examine how translators describe their work—what they believe they are doing and why it matters—through close readings of English translations from a range of source texts. Attention will be paid to the strategies translators employ and to the implications of those choices for understanding translation as a literary and political practice, including its intersections with gender and rhetoric. Students will also complete a translation project of their own, using this work to interrogate and practice feminist rhetoric in their writing. By the end of the semester, students will have developed a working knowledge of both the theory and craft of literary translation.
|
|
ENGL 491-01
David Bleich
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course is for master's students that have made arrangements with a faculty member to complete readings and discussion in a particular subject in their field of study.
|
|
ENGL 491-03
William Miller
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course is for master's students that have made arrangements with a faculty member to complete readings and discussion in a particular subject in their field of study.
|
|
ENGL 500-01
William Miller
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
Graduate colloquium is a semester-long introduction to doctoral study in English.
|
|
ENGL 508-1
Steven Rozenski
M 2:00PM - 4:40PM
|
|
Readings vary according to subject. The disciplines of book history and textual criticism have long been at the heart of literary study, and have continued to shape the field in recent decades as our age of digitization proceeds apace. This seminar introduces graduate students to the study of manuscripts and early printed books through readings in paleography and codicology, along with workshops in the Robbins Library and Rare Books; although our collective focus will be on the textual history, visual contexts, and modern afterlives of The Canterbury Tales and the Bible in English, students will also be encouraged to apply themselves to archival research projects relating to their own research interests. We will consider the ongoing study of book history during our current age of digital media, working within a variety of archives and projects (with particular attention to the University of Rochester’s Middle English Texts Series and a few other major digital initiatives). Each week will also introduce students to the strengths and weaknesses of either a recently-developed digital tool in book history, or a traditional resource in textual criticism and archival research.
|
|
ENGL 540-01
Bette London
T 2:00PM - 4:40PM
|
|
“Make it New” has generally been accepted as a mantra for literary modernism. But with many of its classics now more than 100 years old, their novelty invites reinvestigation. In recent years, moreover, modernist studies, as a critical field, has itself undergone a significant remaking. With the emergence of “the new modernist studies,” critical attention has shifted to a recognition of multiple and diverse modernisms that stretch the geographic, temporal, and material limits of what once passed for an established canon and that open the field to practitioners not previously recognized as modernists. This turn has brought a profusion of new questions and methodologies and new texts and contexts to consider. This seminar will explore a number of recent challenges to the traditional mapping of the modernist field and to the critical rubrics it has promulgated; we will do so through a reading of some of the key critical interventions in the field that have been published in the last couple of decades, but also through a rereading of iconic texts of British modernism. We will also look at how postmodern and contemporary artists have recast and transformed some of these modernist icons, sometimes by literally taking them apart and re-piecing them together.
|
|
ENGL 555-01
Jason Middleton
W 2:00PM - 4:40PM
|
|
The horror film has consistently put on spectacular, fantastic display a range of historically andculturally specific fears and anxieties. The genre has been especially generative for theoristsseeking to understand the somatic and affective capacities of the cinematic medium, and scholarshave explored the complex and contradictory politics of the genre’s visceral effects. This seminardoes not present a cultural history of the horror film or trace the evolution of the genre. Rather,we will examine theories of horror as they have developed in relation to other approaches infilm/media studies and critical theory, including psychoanalysis, Marxism, queer theory,disability studies, and affect theory. The seminar is organized into two alternating conceptualgroupings: gender, sexuality, and the body; horror as political allegory.
|
|
ENGL 561-02
Ur Staff
R 2:00PM - 4:40PM
|
|
This course is an introduction to theories, methods, and debates related to digital studies in literature, media, and culture. Designed with students from multiple disciplines in mind, the course will explore how the kinds of knowledge production enabled by digital media and technologies to think through the relationship between computational methods and more traditional modes of humanistic analysis. Topics to be surveyed may include, among others, what data is and how to work with it in the humanities; the role of coding and programming in humanistic thought; the tendency toward collaboration in digital studies; textual editing and time-based annotation in digital formats; where artificial fits into digital studies in literature, media, and culture; digital modalities such as visualization, network analysis, text analysis and topic modeling, gaming, mapping over time and space, spectral imaging, and videographic criticism. Students should exit the course with a cross-disciplinary understanding of the intellectual framework—from textual science and media theory to bibliographic and archival science—animating digital studies in both the past and present.
|
|
ENGL 562-01
Joel Burges
TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM
|
|
This course is an introduction to scholarly research as creative practice, with an emphasis on multimodal forms of knowledge production in the digital sphere such as graphic design, data visualization, video essays and academic filmmaking, digital storytelling and art, website construction, user experience, podcasting, artificial intelligence, and other approaches. While we will consider scholarly research as creative practice across the arts and humanities, our emphasis will be on forms that engage the academic and aesthetic affordances of digital media and technology. How might a form such as the video essay allow humanists to work both creatively and critically at the same time? How might the principles of graphic design and practices of collage enable new styles of academic communication in both scholarly and non-scholarly contexts? Can we ethically and thoughtfully use artificial intelligence or visualization software both to produce and present knowledge to various publics? Students will explore answers to these questions not only through readings that theorize research as practice, but through exercises that build to a final project of their own that straddles scholarly research and creative practice.
|
|
ENGL 571-01
Ashley Conklin; Luke Latella
MWF 10:00AM - 1:00PM
|
|
Restriction: Instructor's permission required
|
|
ENGL 574-01
Jeff Stoiber
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
Under the direction of English Department Faculty and staff of George Eastman Museum’s Moving Image Department, the student will plan and undertake a significant project designed to challenge her/his abilities to function at a professional level in the moving image archive field. Examples of potential projects include: archival projection, public programming and exhibitions, collection management, video and digital preservation techniques, processing and conservation of motion picture related materials, acquisitions, access and cataloging.
|
|
ENGL 575-01
–
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
topic specific training/study in film preservation work.
|
|
ENGL 580-01
William Miller
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
2nd year PhD or 2nd year MA Selznick pedagogical TA training.
|
|
ENGL 581-01
William Miller
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
Graduate students will receive training in general and specific skills related to our digital projects as well as our physical archives. Assignments will vary according to departmental needs and student preferences.
|
|
ENGL 588-1
Ur Staff
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
Over this 2-semester course sequence, students will implement the skills of professional copyediting and journal management, including some new AI-integrated publication tools and best practices. This will actively contribute to the publication of an open-access academic journal, Blake Illustrated Quarterly. The course will meet for “Grammar Bootcamp” week 1 and 2 of the semester Tues, Wed, and Thurs from 5-7:30 with periodic meetings throughout the semester based on participants schedules.
|
|
ENGL 591-01
William Miller
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course is for PhD students that have made arrangements with a faculty member to complete readings and discussion in a particular subject in their field of study.
|
|
ENGL 591-03
Steven Rozenski
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course is for PhD students that have made arrangements with a faculty member to complete readings and discussion in a particular subject in their field of study.
|
|
ENGL 591-04
–
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course is for PhD students that have made arrangements with a faculty member to complete readings and discussion in a particular subject in their field of study.
|
|
ENGL 591-05
Katherine Mannheimer
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course is for PhD students that have made arrangements with a faculty member to complete readings and discussion in a particular subject in their field of study.
|
|
ENGL 591-06
Supritha Rajan
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course is for PhD students that have made arrangements with a faculty member to complete readings and discussion in a particular subject in their field of study.
|
|
ENGL 595-01
William Miller
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course provides PhD students with fewer than 90 credits the opportunity to conduct, develop, and refine their doctoral research projects. Students will engage in research relevant to their field of study and make progress toward completing their dissertations.
|
|
ENGL 895-01
–
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course provides masters students the opportunity to work on their dissertation. Students will make progress toward completing degree requirements.
|
|
ENGL 897-01
William Miller
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course provides master's students who are currently completing their final required coursework, or with special circumstances like an approved reduced courseload, with the opportunity to work full-time on their degrees. Students will make significant progress toward completing their degrees.
|
|
ENGL 995-01
William Miller
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course provides PhD students the opportunity to work on their dissertation. Students will make progress toward completing degree requirements.
|
|
ENGL 999-01
William Miller
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course provides PhD students the opportunity to work full-time on their dissertation. Students will make significant progress toward completing degree requirements.
|
Fall 2026
| Number | Title | Instructor | Time |
|---|---|
| Monday | |
|
ENGL 475-1
Stephen Schottenfeld
|
|
|
This workshop is for advanced fiction writers who have completed ENG 121 or have permission from the instructor. The course emphasizes the development of each student's individual style and imagination, as well as the practical and technical concerns of a fiction writer's craft. Readings will be drawn from a wide variety of modern and contemporary writers. Students will be expected to write three original short stories as well as to revise extensively in order to explore the full range of the story's potential. Applicable English Cluster: Creative Writing. |
|
|
ENGL 487-04
Rachel O'Donnell
|
|
|
This course introduces students to the theoretical foundations, practical challenges, and creative possibilities of literary translation. We will examine how translators describe their work—what they believe they are doing and why it matters—through close readings of English translations from a range of source texts. Attention will be paid to the strategies translators employ and to the implications of those choices for understanding translation as a literary and political practice, including its intersections with gender and rhetoric. Students will also complete a translation project of their own, using this work to interrogate and practice feminist rhetoric in their writing. By the end of the semester, students will have developed a working knowledge of both the theory and craft of literary translation. |
|
|
ENGL 508-1
Steven Rozenski
|
|
|
Readings vary according to subject. |
|
| Monday and Wednesday | |
|
ENGL 442-01
Gregory Heyworth
|
|
|
Varying topics tracing themes, ideas, or figures beyond the limits of any single historical period. Please see public notes for specific section titles and course descriptions. This topics course can be repeated (2 times) for additional credit as long as the special topic (section title) is different. |
|
|
ENGL 447-01
–
|
|
|
With recent advances in artificial intelligence, space exploration, and molecular biology—as well as a variety of social, health, and environmental crises—life in the 21st-century is increasingly Science Fiction-like. Moreover, mainstream contemporary literature increasingly draws from Science Fiction for formal innovations and thematic insights. This course focuses on the Science Fiction short story to introduce students to the history and diversity of this genre, including European literary antecedents, early 20th-century pulp fiction, the Golden Age, the New Wave, cyberpunk, Afrofuturism, and beyond. The course also features works of cultural criticism that demonstrate how the genre has addressed, often in advance, a variety of real-world topics. Course requirements include periodic one-page Reading Responses, an in-class presentation, and a formal paper, as well as class attendance and participation. |
|
|
ENGL 405-02
Donatella Stocchi-Perucchio
|
|
|
The first of a two-course sequence, this class approaches The Divine Comedy both as a poetic masterpiece and as an encyclopedia of medieval culture. Through close textual analysis of Inferno and the first half of Purgatorio, students learn to approach Dante’s poetry as a vehicle for thought, an instrument of self-discovery, and a means to understand and engage with historical reality. The course also provides insight into Biblical, Christian, and Classical traditions as they intersect with Dante’s wide-ranging concerns, spanning literature, history, politics, government, philosophy, and theology. A visual component, including illustrations of the Comedy and other artworks related to the narrative, complements the study of the text. Classes combine lectures, discussion, and a weekly recitation session, with intensive participation strongly encouraged. Dante I may be taken independently of Dante II. |
|
| Monday, Wednesday, and Friday | |
|
ENGL 571-01
Ashley Conklin; Luke Latella
|
|
|
Restriction: Instructor's permission required |
|
| Tuesday | |
|
ENGL 478-01
Joanna Scott
|
|
|
Read short stories by contemporary writers along with fiction by the students in the workshop, and discuss ways writers can sharpen the conversation between text and reader. Also consider editing and reviewing techniques. Students expected to write and revise at least three original stories or three sections of a longer work of fiction. |
|
|
ENGL 479-01
Jennifer Grotz
|
|
|
Poems, as William Carlos Williams once said, are machines made out of words, and in this advanced poetry workshop we will work on making the most gorgeous, gripping, and efficient machines possible. To that end, we will read both one another's poems and poems by established authors, in either case paying attention to the ways in which the authors harness aspects of their medium, the English language: syntax, diction, rhythm. The poems we write may take any shape, any form, but we will work towards understanding why a particular poem must take the shape it has; we will pay attention not so much to what the poems say as to how they say it. Requirements: weekly writing and reading assignments, revisions of assignments, devoted participation in class discussions, a final project. |
|
|
ENGL 540-01
Bette London
|
|
|
“Make it New” has generally been accepted as a mantra for literary modernism. But with many of its classics now more than 100 years old, their novelty invites reinvestigation. In recent years, moreover, modernist studies, as a critical field, has itself undergone a significant remaking. With the emergence of “the new modernist studies,” critical attention has shifted to a recognition of multiple and diverse modernisms that stretch the geographic, temporal, and material limits of what once passed for an established canon and that open the field to practitioners not previously recognized as modernists. This turn has brought a profusion of new questions and methodologies and new texts and contexts to consider. This seminar will explore a number of recent challenges to the traditional mapping of the modernist field and to the critical rubrics it has promulgated; we will do so through a reading of some of the key critical interventions in the field that have been published in the last couple of decades, but also through a rereading of iconic texts of British modernism. We will also look at how postmodern and contemporary artists have recast and transformed some of these modernist icons, sometimes by literally taking them apart and re-piecing them together. |
|
| Tuesday and Thursday | |
|
ENGL 466-01
Brady Fletcher
|
|
|
Topics in the study of film. Please see public notes for specific section titles and course descriptions. This topics course can be repeated (2 times) for additional credit as long as the special topic (section title) is different. |
|
|
ENGL 462-01
Andrew Korn
|
|
|
This course explores three of Italy’s most prominent post-WWII directors, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Liliana Cavani, who developed distinct cinemas and contributed radical representations to key cultural debates. Students will examine each filmmaker’s specific thematic and stylistic innovations, such as Fellini’s carnivalesque and dreamlike states, Antonioni’s use of space and color, and Cavani’s marginal figures and use of flashback. Students will also compare how their works address three of postwar Italy’s and the West’s most critical questions: modernization, the 1968 student protests and the legacy of Fascism. Films include: Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Amarcord; Antonioni’s Red Desert and Zabriskie Point; and Cavani’s The Cannibals and The Night Porter. Assignments include: historical, biographical and critical readings, film screenings, short papers and a final essay. Readings will be in English and films will be shown with English subtitles. |
|
|
ENGL 562-01
Joel Burges
|
|
|
This course is an introduction to scholarly research as creative practice, with an emphasis on multimodal forms of knowledge production in the digital sphere such as graphic design, data visualization, video essays and academic filmmaking, digital storytelling and art, website construction, user experience, podcasting, artificial intelligence, and other approaches. While we will consider scholarly research as creative practice across the arts and humanities, our emphasis will be on forms that engage the academic and aesthetic affordances of digital media and technology. How might a form such as the video essay allow humanists to work both creatively and critically at the same time? How might the principles of graphic design and practices of collage enable new styles of academic communication in both scholarly and non-scholarly contexts? Can we ethically and thoughtfully use artificial intelligence or visualization software both to produce and present knowledge to various publics? Students will explore answers to these questions not only through readings that theorize research as practice, but through exercises that build to a final project of their own that straddles scholarly research and creative practice. |
|
|
ENGL 406-01
Sarah Higley
|
|
|
Varying topics relating to the literature and culture of the Middle Ages. |
|
| Wednesday | |
|
ENGL 555-01
Jason Middleton
|
|
|
The horror film has consistently put on spectacular, fantastic display a range of historically andculturally specific fears and anxieties. The genre has been especially generative for theoristsseeking to understand the somatic and affective capacities of the cinematic medium, and scholarshave explored the complex and contradictory politics of the genre’s visceral effects. This seminardoes not present a cultural history of the horror film or trace the evolution of the genre. Rather,we will examine theories of horror as they have developed in relation to other approaches infilm/media studies and critical theory, including psychoanalysis, Marxism, queer theory,disability studies, and affect theory. The seminar is organized into two alternating conceptualgroupings: gender, sexuality, and the body; horror as political allegory. |
|
| Thursday | |
|
ENGL 437-01
Erik Larsen
|
|
|
Throughout much of modern medical and cultural history, bodily difference has been categorized as disability—as a problematic deviation from standards of normalcy and health. This legacy has been fiercely debated and contested in recent years, with much disagreement about the category’s usefulness in medical contexts and beyond. This course will explore different perspectives on disability through works of modern culture, and primarily through literature, television, and film. We will investigate the traditional medical model of disability, and explore what changing understandings of disability mean for the future of healthcare and the relationship between healthcare providers and patients. The course is writing-intensive, and requires students to share and workshop their papers with peers. |
|
|
ENGL 561-02
Ur Staff
|
|
|
This course is an introduction to theories, methods, and debates related to digital studies in literature, media, and culture. Designed with students from multiple disciplines in mind, the course will explore how the kinds of knowledge production enabled by digital media and technologies to think through the relationship between computational methods and more traditional modes of humanistic analysis. Topics to be surveyed may include, among others, what data is and how to work with it in the humanities; the role of coding and programming in humanistic thought; the tendency toward collaboration in digital studies; textual editing and time-based annotation in digital formats; where artificial fits into digital studies in literature, media, and culture; digital modalities such as visualization, network analysis, text analysis and topic modeling, gaming, mapping over time and space, spectral imaging, and videographic criticism. Students should exit the course with a cross-disciplinary understanding of the intellectual framework—from textual science and media theory to bibliographic and archival science—animating digital studies in both the past and present. |
|
| Friday | |