Spring Term Schedule for Graduate Courses
The default view for the table below is "Sortable". This will allow you to sort any column in ascending order by clicking on its column heading.
Spring 2027
| Number | Title | Instructor | Time |
|---|
|
ENGL 400-1
Ur Staff
MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM
|
|
All languages change over time, often in predictable patterns. Where did today’s standard English come from, and how is our sense of that standard tied to assumptions about race, class, gender, and nationality? To find out, we will begin roughly 5,000 years ago, studying the common ancestor of languages as different as English, Hindi, and Polish: Proto-Indo-European. We will learn about the prehistoric roots of English, then turn to the earliest written evidence of it: “Anglo-Saxon” or “Old English,” ca. 600-1100.The language was transformed in the wake of the Norman Invasion of 1066, as English became lower in status than both Anglo-Norman French and Latin for a few centuries. Next, we will learn about the growth of English, and its changes, in the age of Chaucer (Middle English) and Shakespeare (Early Modern English). Finally, we will explore processes of standardization, hybridization, and diffusion in the complex effects of English’s spread across the globe over the course of the past 450 years.
|
|
ENGL 402-01
Donatella Stocchi-Perucchio
MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM
|
|
The second of a sequence of two, the course approaches "The Divine Comedy" both as a poetic masterpiece and as an encyclopedia of medieval culture. Through a close textual analysis of the second half of 'Purgatorio' and the entirety of 'Paradiso,' students learn how to approach Dantes poetry as a vehicle for thought, an instrument of self-discovery, and a way to understand and affect the historical reality. They also gain a perspective on the Biblical, Christian, and Classical traditions as they intersect with the multiple levels of Dantes concern, ranging from literature to history, from politics to government, from philosophy to theology. Prerequisites: ITAL 220 - Dante's Divine Comedy I or permission of the instructor. Part of the Dante Humanities Cluster.
|
|
ENGL 406-1
Ur Staff
MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM
|
|
Varying topics relating to the literature and culture of the Middle Ages. The conversion from paganism to Christianity was the most profound cultural change in European history. In medieval British and Icelandic literature, however, the legacies of three distinct paganisms - Greco-Roman, Celtic, and Germanic - were never truly discarded. The medieval afterlife of pagan Rome was profoundly literary: Cicero, Ovid, Virgil, and others continued to be adapted and translated. The Icelandic sagas we will read portray conversion in direct, combative terms: Thor challenged Christ to a duel, one Viking character even claims, but Jesus backed down. Another Icelander wrote a collection of Norse pagan myths, the Prose Edda, in the 13th century as a way to preserve a poetic language that couldn’t be otherwise understood. Throughout this course, we will read texts which explore the interaction between Christian authors and these pagan pasts - from the conversion of Germanic tribes and the surviving fragments of their oral literature, to the reinterpretation of pagan Latin authors within a Christian context.
|
|
ENGL 408-01
Rosemary Kegl
MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM
|
|
Varying topics relating to Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama, in its historical and cultural contexts. 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. This course considers the popular tradition of revenge tragedy in the English Renaissance, including the plays’ characteristic violent, macabre, and bloody spectacles. Why did English Renaissance audiences find so fascinating and compelling revenge tragedy’s many excesses (emotional, linguistic, narrative, theatrical)? How is the quality of tragedy altered when it is modified with “revenge”? Which Renaissance performance traditions would have enhanced the audience’s experience of revenge tragedy? Did audiences expect revenge tragedy to differ depending on the kind of theater that they attended or the particular company involved in the staging? We will consider plays written by Chettle, Ford, Kyd, Marston, Middleton, Tourneur, Shakespeare, and Webster and, when possible, view video of recent staged productions. Satisfies the pre-1800 literature, the dramatic literature, the literature, and the 200-level literature requirements for various English major and minor tracks. Satisfies a requirement in the following Humanities/English cluster: Plays, Playwrights, and Theater. This course is appropriate for all students, from those in their first year at the university to senior English majors. No restrictions or prerequisites.
|
|
ENGL 438-01
Matthew Omelsky
TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM
|
|
Varying topics relating to the literature of the 20th and 21st Centuries. Please see public notes for specific section titles and course descriptions. This topics course can be repeated (4 times) for additional credit as long as the special topic (section title) is different. The 21st century has seen an exciting array of fiction and film emerge from the African continent, a development that contributes vitally to global black culture. Mainstays of this new generation of narrative include sci-fi, fantasy, and horror; themes of climate change, transnational migration, and the space of LGBTQ life; as well as a proliferation of generic and formal experiments across media and platforms. In this course, we’ll study novels, short stories, narrative films, and web film series by artists from Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Morocco and elsewhere to understand how artists from the continent imagine the relationship between culture and history, hope and anxiety, home and world. Writers and filmmakers will include Chimamanda Adichie, Wanuri Kahiu, NoViolet Bulawayo, Dilman Dila, Nnedi Okorafor, Andrew Dosunmu, among others.
|
|
ENGL 443-01
Christian Wessels
MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM
|
|
Intensive study of the writings of a single author or small group of authors from literary traditions in English. 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. This class focuses on the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, two of the most influential American poets from the nineteenth century. We look closely at the construction of their poems while accounting for the historical context in which these works were made. Examining both poets’ visions of their nation, we will think about the transcultural formation of an American literary tradition and how it has changed since the nineteenth century. To that end, we will consider questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and community formation. We will encounter along the way other significant American writers, including peers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass, as well as twentieth century and contemporary writers in conversation with Whitman and Dickinson (Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Terrance Hayes).
|
|
ENGL 447-01
Sarah Higley
TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM
|
|
Varying topics relating to writings of science fiction from a variety of periods and cultures. Our word robot comes from Czech robota (“compulsory labor”), made famous by Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. Long before the word existed, the handcrafted "virtual" human was and is a fixture of myth, science fiction, and science itself. How monstrous or benevolent is this uncanny creature? Our course examines how artificial beings have represented and disturbed concepts of the soul, the mind, language, and body from antiquity to the present. We'll investigate magic, labor, utility, gender and sexuality, personhood, ownership, desire, and moral responsibility in Yan Shi’s mechanical man from the medieval Chinese Liezi; the robots of the Pali Lokapaññatti; the talking brazen heads of medieval Europe; Asimov’s “Satisfaction Guaranteed” from I, Robot and other short texts. Three novels: Shelley’s Frankenstein; Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; and Greer’s recent Annie Bot. Two episodes about Data in ST:TNG ; and five films: Metropolis; Blade Runner; The Terminator; Ex Machina; and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. We'll end with real concerns over Anthropic, ChatGPT, and robot production.
|
|
ENGL 449-01
Bette London
MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM
|
|
Varying topics relating to writings by women and the representation of gender from a variety of periods and cultures. Please see public notes for specific section titles and course descriptions. This topics course can be repeated (3 times) for additional credit as long as the special topic (section title) is different. The nineteenth-century novel is usually associated with Victorian values: happy marriage; wholesome homes; moral propriety; properly channeled emotions and ambitions. Many of the most popular novels, however, paint a very different picture: with madwomen locked in attics and asylums; monsters, real and imagined, lurking behind the façade of propriety; genteel homes harboring opium addicts; fallen women walking the streets; and sexual transgression and degeneracy popping up everywhere. Indeed, for novels centrally structured around marriage and society, madness and monstrosity appear with alarming regularity. The intertwining of these tropes suggests some of the cultural anxieties unleashed by the new body of women writers and women readers. We will begin with Frankenstein and end with Dracula, two novels from opposite ends of the century. We will also consider such classic marriage plot novels as Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre and some popular sensation fiction of the 1860s.
|
|
ENGL 455-01
Danielle Genevro
TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM
|
|
This course surveys the history of cinema from its emergence in the mid-1890s to the transition to sound in the late 1920s. We will examine the cinema as a set of aesthetic, social, technological, national, cultural and industrial practices as they were exercised and developed during this 30-year span. We will explore the diverse forms cinema took and functions it performed during this period by looking closely at a range of films and writings about films and film culture. We will also examine contexts within which these films were produced and experienced as well as theorizations of cinema that emerged concurrently with them. The course thus introduces students to the study of film history as well as a key national and international trends in making and thinking about cinema as it rose to prominence as a vital component of the art and culture of the twentieth century. Previous coursework in film is recommended, though not required; please contact the professor if this will be your first experience studying film in an academic setting.
|
|
ENGL 458-01
Danielle Genevro
W 2:00PM - 4:40PM
|
|
Moving images recorded on analog film defined the 20th century in an unprecedented way. This course considers the tangible object that is the source of the image onscreen, and the social, cultural, and historical value of a reel of film as an organic element with a finite life cycle. We focus on the analog photographic element and its origins (both theatrical and small gauge), the basics of photochemical film technology, and the state of film conservation and preservation worldwide. Guest lectures by staff of the Moving Image Department of George Eastman Museum provide a first-hand look at film preservation in action, allowing us to consider analog film as an ephemeral form of material culture: a multipurpose, visual record that is art, entertainment, evidentiary document, and historical artifact. Weekly film assignments. Class meets on River Campus and at George Eastman Museum (900 East Ave, no admission fee; STUDENTS PROVIDE THEIR OWN TRANSPORTATION FOR CLASSES OFF CAMPUS). No audits, no pre-requisites. Enrollment limited by hands-on nature of course and meeting space capacity.
|
|
ENGL 466-01
Jason Middleton
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. Offering a grounding in horror studies and film theory, this course invites students to view horror cinema with close attention to both formal and social/historical elements. One particular focus of the course will be on how the horror genre reflects larger cultural anxieties surrounding race, gender, class, and sexuality over time. Subtopics will include grief and trauma in horror; found footage and techno-horror; folk horror; and eco-horror. Prerequisites: Either one English or Film and Media Studies course.
|
|
ENGL 466-02
Brady Fletcher
TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM
|
|
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. Documentary film and media, unlike their deliberately fictional counterparts, purport to represent reality on screen. In so doing, of course, documentary filmmakers invariably make choices about how they represent that reality. Furthermore, such films and media are frequently argumentative or advocacy-oriented: they attempt to persuade, reveal, or motivate action on the part of spectators. Others claim to be neutral arbiters of information on a given topic, yet also require critical scrutiny of their more subtle political and ideological alignments. Whether offering an alternative public sphere to work through complicated issues in good faith, representing an otherwise marginalized perspective or experience, or reproducing ideologically problematic ideas that hamper public discourse, documentaries are, at their heart, political acts. Thus, the history of the concept of documentary is entangled with questions about authenticity, authorship, and audience – questions that continue to permeate our current historical moment and its media. By systematically and critically screening documentary film, television, and digital media of the past century, we will investigate the history of the political stakes of such productions. From documentary’s prehistory in actualities and newsreels, to one of the earliest documentary filmmakers, Robert Flaherty, to master documentarians like Frederick Wiseman, Emile de Antonio, and D.A. Pennebaker, and more recent examples like Michael Moore, Werner Herzog, and Errol Morris, we will trace the political investments and innovative techniques that made their works powerful. Through readings on nonfiction media history and theory, discussion, writing, and lots of close watching, we will ultimately arrive at a better understanding of how studying the politics of documentary might help us navigate our current complex media landscape.
|
|
ENGL 468-01
Gregory Heyworth
TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM
|
|
This course introduces students to the methods involved in turning real objects into virtual ones using cutting edge digital imaging technology and image rendering techniques. Focusing on manuscripts, paintings, maps, and 3D artifacts, students will learn the basics of multispectral imaging, photogrammetry, and Reflectance Transformation Imaging, and spectral image processing using ENVI and Photoshop. These skills will be applied to data from the ongoing research of the Lazarus Project as well as to local cultural heritage collections.
|
|
ENGL 472-01
Jeff Stoiber
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
Restricted to Selznick Students
|
|
ENGL 473-01
Jeff Stoiber
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
Restricted to Selznick Students
|
|
ENGL 474-01
Jeff Stoiber
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
Restricted to Selznick Students
|
|
ENGL 475-03
David Hansen
R 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
Stephen Schottenfeld
M 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 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 500-1
William Miller
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
Graduate colloquium is a semester-long introduction to doctoral study in English.
|
|
ENGL 513-1
William Miller
R 2:00PM - 4:40PM
|
|
What is or was the soul? This entity or concept is at the heart of religion, philosophy, psychology, and literary history, but has long fallen out of view in literary studies. The soul has once again assumed its traditional prominence in political and philosophical discourses and bears strongly in some of the major conversations of our time: regarding gender, race, nature, and consciousness. This course has three goals. Offers grounding in the history of one of the most important and enduring ideas ever formulated. Identifies possible avenues of research and publication. Introduces a variety of research methods, including careful interpretation of texts and the use of archives and databases.
|
|
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 551-1
Kenneth Gross
W 2:00PM - 4:40PM
|
|
The seminar will focus on ways of reading lyric poetry, taking stock of lyric poems’ immediacy and music, how poems play, how they remember, their conversations with ordinary language, how poems open up to vulnerable forms of thought and feeling, their negotiations with silence, even nonsense. We’ll be centering on two crucial bodies of lyric poetry in English, Shakespeare’s sonnets and the poems of Emily Dickinson, as well as sampling pieces by various other poets. We’ll also look closely at different traditions of critical and theoretical writing about lyric, including work by William Empson, Allen Grossman, Sharon Cameron, Anne Carson, Jonathan Culler, Susan Stewart, and Susan Howe. The seminar will focus on ways of reading lyric poetry, taking stock of lyric poems’ immediacy and music, how poems play, how they remember, their conversations with ordinary language, how poems open up to vulnerable forms of thought and feeling, their negotiations with silence, even nonsense. We’ll be centering on two crucial bodies of lyric poetry in English, Shakespeare’s sonnets and the poems of Emily Dickinson, as well as sampling pieces by various other poets. We’ll also look closely at different traditions of critical and theoretical writing about lyric, including work by William Empson, Allen Grossman, Sharon Cameron, Anne Carson, Jonathan Culler, Susan Stewart, and Susan Howe. Studying how these critics think about poems will help us get a better sense of how poems think about themselves. It’s not an accident that many of the critics we’ll be reading are themselves important poets. no prerequisites, open to PhD and MA students in English and affiliated departments
|
|
ENGL 563-1
Joel Burges
M 2:00PM - 4:40PM
|
|
This course is a team-taught seminar focused on established, ongoing digital-studies projects housed at the University of Rochester. It will consist of three modules in which students acquire hands-on experience in the methods and goals of these projects and explore the larger theoretical and practical implications of this kind of work. Projects may include (for example) the Medieval English Text Series; Mediate: A Digital Annotation Tool; the William Blake Archive; the Lazarus Project; Digital Elmina; Watershed Movements; as well as potential collaborations with librarians and archivists from Rush Rhees Library, the Visual Studies Workshop, the George Eastman Museum, the Memorial Art Gallery, the Strong Museum, and other local organizations. Through these case studies, students will consider questions of how digital projects are scaled and sustained; how labor is shared and distributed in projects of these types; and what kinds of knowledge production and creative practices digital projects are best able to facilitate and circulate. Students should exit the class having gained a familiarity with several projects, as well as the ability to conceptualize and design their own projects.
|
|
ENGL 572-01
Ashley Conklin; Luke Latella
M 9:00AM - 10:15AM
|
|
The yearlong practicum has two components, a practicum group, which is led by a 571 course instructor, and a mentor group, which is led by an experienced WSAP instructor. These two groups involve new instructors in a combination of small group meetings, class observations, individual meetings, and workshops designed to support and further educate new instructors. Small group meetings, classroom observations, and individual meetings offer new teachers a chance to gain different perspectives on their teaching, identify their teaching strengths, and work out solutions to teaching difficulties. The larger goal of all meetings is to encourage instructors to work with colleagues across the disciplines to create a supportive and intellectually challenging community, a community that they can call on throughout their career as educators.
|
|
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
Jeff Stoiber
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 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 594-01
–
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course provides PhD students with the opportunity to gain practical experience in a professional setting related to their field of study. Students must register for one credit of internship during the semester in which they participate. Must have approval of the Graduate Education and Postdoctoral Affairs Office for SAS and Hajim.
|
|
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 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 doctoral students the opportunity to work on their dissertation. Students will make progress toward completing degree requirements.
|
|
ENGL 995A-01
William Miller
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course provides PhD students the opportunity to work on their dissertation in absentia. Students will make progress toward completing degree requirements.
|
|
ENGL 999-01
William Miller
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course provides doctoral students the opportunity to work full-time on their dissertation in absentia. Students will make significant progress toward completing degree requirements.
|
Spring 2027
| Number | Title | Instructor | Time |
|---|---|
| Monday | |
|
ENGL 572-01
Ashley Conklin; Luke Latella
|
|
|
The yearlong practicum has two components, a practicum group, which is led by a 571 course instructor, and a mentor group, which is led by an experienced WSAP instructor. These two groups involve new instructors in a combination of small group meetings, class observations, individual meetings, and workshops designed to support and further educate new instructors. Small group meetings, classroom observations, and individual meetings offer new teachers a chance to gain different perspectives on their teaching, identify their teaching strengths, and work out solutions to teaching difficulties. The larger goal of all meetings is to encourage instructors to work with colleagues across the disciplines to create a supportive and intellectually challenging community, a community that they can call on throughout their career as educators. |
|
|
ENGL 478-01
Stephen Schottenfeld
|
|
|
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 563-1
Joel Burges
|
|
|
This course is a team-taught seminar focused on established, ongoing digital-studies projects housed at the University of Rochester. It will consist of three modules in which students acquire hands-on experience in the methods and goals of these projects and explore the larger theoretical and practical implications of this kind of work. Projects may include (for example) the Medieval English Text Series; Mediate: A Digital Annotation Tool; the William Blake Archive; the Lazarus Project; Digital Elmina; Watershed Movements; as well as potential collaborations with librarians and archivists from Rush Rhees Library, the Visual Studies Workshop, the George Eastman Museum, the Memorial Art Gallery, the Strong Museum, and other local organizations. Through these case studies, students will consider questions of how digital projects are scaled and sustained; how labor is shared and distributed in projects of these types; and what kinds of knowledge production and creative practices digital projects are best able to facilitate and circulate. Students should exit the class having gained a familiarity with several projects, as well as the ability to conceptualize and design their own projects. |
|
| Monday and Wednesday | |
|
ENGL 406-1
Ur Staff
|
|
|
Varying topics relating to the literature and culture of the Middle Ages. |
|
|
ENGL 408-01
Rosemary Kegl
|
|
|
Varying topics relating to Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama, in its historical and cultural contexts. 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 449-01
Bette London
|
|
|
Varying topics relating to writings by women and the representation of gender from a variety of periods and cultures. Please see public notes for specific section titles and course descriptions. This topics course can be repeated (3 times) for additional credit as long as the special topic (section title) is different. |
|
|
ENGL 400-1
Ur Staff
|
|
|
All languages change over time, often in predictable patterns. Where did today’s standard English come from, and how is our sense of that standard tied to assumptions about race, class, gender, and nationality? To find out, we will begin roughly 5,000 years ago, studying the common ancestor of languages as different as English, Hindi, and Polish: Proto-Indo-European. We will learn about the prehistoric roots of English, then turn to the earliest written evidence of it: “Anglo-Saxon” or “Old English,” ca. 600-1100.The language was transformed in the wake of the Norman Invasion of 1066, as English became lower in status than both Anglo-Norman French and Latin for a few centuries. Next, we will learn about the growth of English, and its changes, in the age of Chaucer (Middle English) and Shakespeare (Early Modern English). Finally, we will explore processes of standardization, hybridization, and diffusion in the complex effects of English’s spread across the globe over the course of the past 450 years. |
|
|
ENGL 402-01
Donatella Stocchi-Perucchio
|
|
|
The second of a sequence of two, the course approaches "The Divine Comedy" both as a poetic masterpiece and as an encyclopedia of medieval culture. Through a close textual analysis of the second half of 'Purgatorio' and the entirety of 'Paradiso,' students learn how to approach Dantes poetry as a vehicle for thought, an instrument of self-discovery, and a way to understand and affect the historical reality. They also gain a perspective on the Biblical, Christian, and Classical traditions as they intersect with the multiple levels of Dantes concern, ranging from literature to history, from politics to government, from philosophy to theology. |
|
|
ENGL 443-01
Christian Wessels
|
|
|
Intensive study of the writings of a single author or small group of authors from literary traditions in English. 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. |
|
| Tuesday | |
|
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
Jason Middleton
|
|
|
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 438-01
Matthew Omelsky
|
|
|
Varying topics relating to the literature of the 20th and 21st Centuries. Please see public notes for specific section titles and course descriptions. This topics course can be repeated (4 times) for additional credit as long as the special topic (section title) is different. |
|
|
ENGL 468-01
Gregory Heyworth
|
|
|
This course introduces students to the methods involved in turning real objects into virtual ones using cutting edge digital imaging technology and image rendering techniques. Focusing on manuscripts, paintings, maps, and 3D artifacts, students will learn the basics of multispectral imaging, photogrammetry, and Reflectance Transformation Imaging, and spectral image processing using ENVI and Photoshop. These skills will be applied to data from the ongoing research of the Lazarus Project as well as to local cultural heritage collections. |
|
|
ENGL 447-01
Sarah Higley
|
|
|
Varying topics relating to writings of science fiction from a variety of periods and cultures. |
|
|
ENGL 466-02
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 455-01
Danielle Genevro
|
|
|
This course surveys the history of cinema from its emergence in the mid-1890s to the transition to sound in the late 1920s. We will examine the cinema as a set of aesthetic, social, technological, national, cultural and industrial practices as they were exercised and developed during this 30-year span. We will explore the diverse forms cinema took and functions it performed during this period by looking closely at a range of films and writings about films and film culture. We will also examine contexts within which these films were produced and experienced as well as theorizations of cinema that emerged concurrently with them. The course thus introduces students to the study of film history as well as a key national and international trends in making and thinking about cinema as it rose to prominence as a vital component of the art and culture of the twentieth century. Previous coursework in film is recommended, though not required; please contact the professor if this will be your first experience studying film in an academic setting. |
|
| Wednesday | |
|
ENGL 458-01
Danielle Genevro
|
|
|
Moving images recorded on analog film defined the 20th century in an unprecedented way. This course considers the tangible object that is the source of the image onscreen, and the social, cultural, and historical value of a reel of film as an organic element with a finite life cycle. We focus on the analog photographic element and its origins (both theatrical and small gauge), the basics of photochemical film technology, and the state of film conservation and preservation worldwide. Guest lectures by staff of the Moving Image Department of George Eastman Museum provide a first-hand look at film preservation in action, allowing us to consider analog film as an ephemeral form of material culture: a multipurpose, visual record that is art, entertainment, evidentiary document, and historical artifact. Weekly film assignments. Class meets on River Campus and at George Eastman Museum (900 East Ave, no admission fee; STUDENTS PROVIDE THEIR OWN TRANSPORTATION FOR CLASSES OFF CAMPUS). No audits, no pre-requisites. Enrollment limited by hands-on nature of course and meeting space capacity. |
|
|
ENGL 551-1
Kenneth Gross
|
|
|
The seminar will focus on ways of reading lyric poetry, taking stock of lyric poems’ immediacy and music, how poems play, how they remember, their conversations with ordinary language, how poems open up to vulnerable forms of thought and feeling, their negotiations with silence, even nonsense. We’ll be centering on two crucial bodies of lyric poetry in English, Shakespeare’s sonnets and the poems of Emily Dickinson, as well as sampling pieces by various other poets. We’ll also look closely at different traditions of critical and theoretical writing about lyric, including work by William Empson, Allen Grossman, Sharon Cameron, Anne Carson, Jonathan Culler, Susan Stewart, and Susan Howe. |
|
| Thursday | |
|
ENGL 475-03
David Hansen
|
|
|
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 513-1
William Miller
|
|
|
What is or was the soul? This entity or concept is at the heart of religion, philosophy, psychology, and literary history, but has long fallen out of view in literary studies. The soul has once again assumed its traditional prominence in political and philosophical discourses and bears strongly in some of the major conversations of our time: regarding gender, race, nature, and consciousness. This course has three goals. Offers grounding in the history of one of the most important and enduring ideas ever formulated. Identifies possible avenues of research and publication. Introduces a variety of research methods, including careful interpretation of texts and the use of archives and databases. |
|