ENGLISH Course Descriptions for 2026-2027

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Fall Course Descriptions
CourseTitleInstructorDescription
ENGLISH 205HUMANISM?RADHAKRISHNAN, R.E205 is only open to students enrolled in the Master of English program.

So, when the world “human” is so self-evident, why then do we need an “ism” after? What is
the suffix, what does it do, and where does it come from? Is it a faith, a religion, a normative
template, an ideological structure? Is it a compelling worldview, a Gestalt, and if so, is it
historical, eternal, immanent, transcendental? Is humanism fundamentally political, ethical,
aesthetic, ontological, discursive, systemic, epistemological? Is humanism secular or does it
shore up religion by other means? Is the “human” a construct or a natural and exceptionalist
center that overlooks and establishes reality? Is the human a settler or a native or neither?
What is the relationship of Humanism to Nationalism? Is humanism necessarily occidental and
Eurocentric? Does humanism, along with anthropocentrism, need to be critiqued and
transcended in the name of the environment, ecology, artificial intelligence, and planetary
Being? Is the human Self or Other or both? Yes, indeed, questions and more questions. In this
course we will trace the trajectory of the “human” across different terrains, registers, histories,
and scales. I am interested, with your cooperation, in exploring the onto-political continuum,
from Being to being, from being to human being, from human being to citizen being, and so on.
Clearly nationality, gender, race, sexuality, trans-gender, and other indices of identity and
representation will be an organic part of our journey. With the help of texts, literary,
theoretical, and philosophical, we will, human all too human, try all we can to understand who
we are and who the “we” is or should be.

Sampling of texts, literary as well as theoretical, by no means final or definitive: Friedrich
Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Ernst Renan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Marin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Rabindranath
Tagore, Virginia Woolf, Mohandas Gandhi, Frantz Fanon, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison.

Expectations: Very likely 1 long essay or 2 short essays.
ENGLISH 205MODERN ELEGYIZENBERG, O.E205 is only open to students enrolled in the Master of English program.

Does grief have a form? Can mourning be done well, or badly, or even beautifully? In this course, we’ll study the strange meeting place of loss and art, the poetic genre of Elegy. We’ll begin with some ancient examples of the attempt to give voice to the unavoidable reality of mortality, and trace the way that a formless fact like death becomes a genre of literature—one that can take in any or all of the many things we can mourn: a beloved individual, an abstract idea, or even a people.

The second half of the course will be devoted to modern elegies—and to the ways poets closer to us in history have wrestled with the expression of grief.

Authors might include: Virgil, John Milton, Walt Whitman, Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Oswald, Anne Carson.
ENGLISH 206RESEARCH & WRITINGSZALAY, M.
ENGLISH 210ERLY MOD ENG LITGRADY, K.W 02:00pm - 04:50pm, HIB 341

This course will broadly examine early modern English constructs of race, particularly in relation to England’s imperial projects. We will focus in particular on how these constructs are represented in late 15th and early 16th century English drama and culture. We will read dramatic work by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, early modern travel narrative, archival material, and recent scholarship in premodern critical race studies. This course will also operate as a survey of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.
ENGLISH 210LATINA LITERATUREMONTERO ROMAN, V.M 11:00am - 01:50pm, HIB 341

In this course we will read literature and theoretical texts that explore the intersection of discussions of race, gender, and Latinidad. The goal for the course will be to consider some of the ways authors have conceptualized and critiqued Latinidad, and to identify key theories, concepts, and debates that emerge in discussions of their work. This will include discussions of the overlap between Latine theory and disability studies, environmental studies, queer theory, and other areas of critical race studies. Reading primary texts from the 20th century to today, this course provides an introduction to a genealogy of U.S. based Latina authors, and it also offers the opportunity to be exposed to theories and methodologies that emerge in conversation with this tradition.
ENGLISH 210POETICS OF POSSBLTYMORGAN, C.Th 09:00am - 11:50am, HIB 411

This course considers how African American writers have pushed the limits of literary expression to aestheticize subjective experience and various forms of liberation. Reading a range of narrative, poetic, cinematic, and dramatic texts, students will consider the fundamental philosophical premises underlying Black writers’ creative efforts. Contemporary issues in Black Studies and a genealogical survey of Black literary critical debates will guide this course of study.
ENGLISH 210DISPOSSESSED 18TH CMCCALL, S.F 11:00am - 01:50p, HIB 341

Connecting the British enclosure movement to racialized dispossession in the British American colonies, this seminar will introduce students to novels, plays, poems and essays spanning the long eighteenth century (1660-1830) that explore rising mercantilism, imperial expansion and Britain's deepening involvement in transatlantic slavery.
ENGLISH 255WRKSHOP IN ACAD PUBFAN, C.
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
ENGLISH 291GUIDED READINGSTAFF
ENGLISH 291GUIDED READINGSTAFF
ENGLISH 291GUIDED READINGSTAFF
ENGLISH 291GUIDED READINGSTAFF
ENGLISH 291GUIDED READINGSTAFF
ENGLISH 299DISSERTATN RESEARCHALEXANDER, J.
ENGLISH 399UNIVERSITY TEACHINGSTAFF
ENGLISH 399UNIVERSITY TEACHINGLATIOLAIS, P.
ENGLISH 399UNIVERSITY TEACHINGALEXANDER, J.