ENG 600: Research Methods

Introduction to research and writing in the discipline for beginning graduate students. Advanced training in research methods and citation, in critical analysis and scholarly writing, and in disciplinary history and the workings of the academy. Required for all Master of Arts students in their first semester.

ENG 602: Contemporary Critical Theory:  Narrative, Fiction, and the Form of the Novel: Theories and Histories

Combining a formalist approach to the study of narrative with a genre-studies approach to the history of the novel, this course will dive deeply into debates about the origins, structures, interpretive possibilities, and social lives of novelistic narratives from the eighteenth century to the present. How do the definitions, histories, and structures of narrative, fiction, and the novel overlap, intersect, and conflict? How do these categories operate to shape some of our literary and intellectual landscapes today? Most of the literary and theoretical works assigned in our course explore these questions from predominantly Anglophone, American, and/or European intellectual contexts; but students will have the opportunity to work beyond those (fluid) boundaries in some assignments. Readings will include extensive engagement with theoretical texts. We will conduct close-readings of theory and of a variety of novels and novellas, possibly including works by Samuel Richardson, Charlotte Bronte, Jamaica Kincaid, and Margaret Atwood, among others.

ENG 612: Contemporary Black British Literature

 A postcolonial examination of literature related to Black people in Britain and its Commonwealth.

ENG 672: Black Poetry Extravaganza

This course is designed to accompany the historic 2024 Furious Flower Poetry Conference, a once-in-a-decade event inaugurated in 1994. The 2024 conference, under the theme of “The Worlds of Black Poetry,” seeks to establish a space for transformative projects and conversations that center the worldwide, world-making energy of Black poetic expression, analyzing and celebrating its visionary abundance and planetary reach. Students in this course will volunteer at the conference, attend panels and performances with celebrated poets, and study Black poetry as a living art form.