This course explores contemporary issues in higher education with a focus on experiences, issues and challenges commonly encountered by undergraduate students during their first year of university. Interdisciplinary in its focus, topics of exploration include an examination of adult and student development theories, models of student engagement and an investigation into mindset, levels of persistence, habits of mind and personality characteristics that impact student success. An internship component is required. Students taking the course will assume a peer-mentoring role to apply and contextualize theories and skills learned in the course. This is a closed course open only to those students who have successfully secured a peer-mentoring position with the First Year Peer Mentoring program

This internship is a minimum 100-hour experiential learning opportunity. The internship connects the student's subject specialization to aspects of the teaching/training development profession. It will integrate, extend, and deepen the learning experience as students begin to identify particular academic or professional insights. Prior to enrollment, internship proposals must be approved by the program coordinator. As part of this course, students may have the option of participating in an international learning experience that will have an additional cost and application process.

This ROP provides the opportunity for students to join a research team and assist on projects currently underway in Education Studies. The work will include preparing an impact study, conducting interviews and using a data-informed approach to investigate the impact of a range of programs and educational interventions. The work will involve conducting pre and post surveys, leading qualitative observational data collection, and producing an analysis. Project descriptions for participating faculty members for the following summer and fall/winter sessions are posted on the ROP website in mid-February and students are invited to apply at that time. See Experiential and International Opportunities for more details.

This course provides practical tools for writing in university and beyond. Students will gain experience in generating ideas, clarifying insights, structuring arguments, composing paragraphs and sentences, critiquing and revising their writing, and communicating effectively to diverse audiences. This course does not count toward any English program.

This foundational course serves as an introduction to a wide range and variety of methods for literary and textual analysis, giving students a set of interpretive tools they can use to analyze texts in English classes and beyond. Emphasis will be on developing close, attentive reading skills as ways of thinking not just about, but through texts, and on deploying these skills effectively in essays and discussions. The class will draw on literary works from a variety of countries, centuries, genres, and media. We recommend that students considering a Specialist, Major, or Minor in English take this course.

This foundational course serves as an introduction to conducting research for English courses at the university level. Skills taught will be: reading and engaging with arguments about literature; incorporating the arguments of others into your own; locating and evaluating secondary sources; and conducting primary research. The class will draw on literary works from a variety of countries, centuries, genres, and media. The class will normally culminate in a longer research paper, developed over the course of the semester. We recommend that students considering a Specialist, Major, or a Minor in English take this course.

It has never been more essential to learn from the history of disease: how we have perceived it and how we have written it. This course introduces students to the important narratives about health, epidemics, and medicine from both non-Western and Western traditions and provides conceptual foundations for ethical thinking about justice, health, and disability in both science and the arts. The survey will cover prose narrative, film, media, non-fiction, and poetry, and will encourage students to think between the past and the present in their analyses and creative projects. Lectures and discussions will emphasize the interlocking relationships between medicine, language, race, empire, and power.

How can narratives inspire social justice and contribute to positive social change? This course introduces students to foundational narratives, texts, and ideas about literature and social change from around the world, providing conceptual foundations for understanding how narratives shape societal and environmental transformation across contexts and disciplines. Through nonfiction, fiction, poetry, film, and digital multimedia, the course investigates how narratives contribute to social, environmental, and human rights movements.

Students will learn about contemporary creative writing in English from around the world. The course will cover the work of some famous writers, such as Toni Morrison or J.M. Coetzee, and also new and emerging authors, from Canada to New Zealand to Nigeria.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) technologies pose a unique set of opportunities and challenges for society. While these technologies require highly specialized knowledge to understand and create, their social impact demands broad, collective consideration. This course will introduce students to important literary, philosophical, and scientific texts that reflect on AI’s use in the human world. What are the ethics of AI? How have literary and artistic imaginings of AI shaped its development and questioned its future? Advances in AI have the power to alter cultural understandings of what it means to be human. Lectures and discussion in this course will provide students with a space to think through the vast implications of these new technologies. This course will empower students to consider what responsible, social implementation of AI entails. The literature of AI shows how technologies emerge not only as material facts but also as process—as stories being written.

This course gives students skills for analyzing the stories that shape our world: traditional literary narratives such as ballads, romances, and novels, and also the kinds of stories we encounter in non-literary contexts such as journalism, movies, myths, jokes, legal judgments, travel writing, histories, songs, diaries, and biographies.

An introductory survey of the forms and history of world drama in its performance context from the classical period to the nineteenth century. May include later works influenced by historical forms and one or more plays in the Theatre Erindale schedule of production. May include a research performance component. This course is also listed as DRE121H5.

An introductory survey of the forms and history of world drama from the late nineteenth century to the present in its performance context. May include film adaptations and one or more plays in the Theatre Erindale schedule of productions. May include a research performance component. This course is also listed as DRE122H5.

An exploration of how late twentieth and twenty-first century literature in English responds to our world. Includes poetry, prose, and drama by major writers, such as Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, J.M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, and emerging writers.

An introduction to poetry, through a close reading of texts, focusing on its traditional forms, themes, techniques, and uses of language; its historical and geographical range; and its twentieth-century diversity.

This course serves as an introduction to influential texts that have shaped British literary history from Beowulf and Geoffrey Chaucer to William Shakespeare, from John Milton and Aphra Behn to Frances Burney. Students will focus on questions such as the range and evolution of poetic forms, the development of the theatre and the novel, and the emergence of women writers. The course will encourage students to think about the study of English literatures in relationship to history, including the history of world literatures.

An introduction to influential texts that have shaped British literary history from the Romantic period to the present, covering developments in poetry, drama, and prose, from William Wordsworth to Zadie Smith and beyond. The course will address topics such as revolution and war; the increasing diversity of poetic forms; the cultural dominance of the novel; romanticism, Victorianism, modernism, and postmodernism; feminism; colonialism and decolonization; the ethnic and cultural diversity of Anglophone literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; literature and sexual identity; the AIDS epidemic; and technology and the digital age. The course will encourage students to think about the study of English literatures in relationship to history, including the history of world literatures.

This course gives students the tools they need to appreciate and understand poetry's traditional and experimental forms, specialized techniques, and diverse ways of using language. The course asks a fundamental question for literary studies: why is poetry is such an important mode of expression in so many different time periods, locations, and cultures?

An introduction to the rhetorical tradition from classical times to the present with a focus on prose as strategic persuasion. Besides rhetorical terminology, topics may include the discovery and arrangement of arguments, validity in argumentation, elements of style, and rhetorical criticism and theory.

This course will use the tools and perspectives of rhetoric, from the Sophists to the postmodern, to analyze and critique the texts and other cultural artifacts that surround us. Much of what we encounter in the cultural realm is an argument; the task in this course will be to understand and engage with those arguments. Students will analyze the rhetoric of poetry, fiction, and drama, as well as of news stories, speeches, video, images, and more.

An introduction to the novel through a reading of ten to twelve texts, representing a range of periods, techniques, regions, and themes.

This course gives students a foundational understanding of the novel in English. It introduces them to the history of the novel, from medieval sagas and adventure stories to modern experiments with fragmentary narratives. The course covers novels from a range of geographical places; students will be asked to consider why the novel has been so successful in the past, and what its futures might be. Students will read at least one complete novel during the course and extracts from others.

This course explores shorter works of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty first-century writers. Special attention will be paid to formal and rhetorical concepts for the study of fiction as well as to issues such as narrative voice, allegory, irony, and the representation of temporality.

This course explores collections of short stories. It examines individual stories, the relationships among and between stories, the dynamics of the collection as a whole, and the literary history of this genre, along with its narrative techniques and thematic concerns.

An introduction to the Canadian short story, this course emphasizes its rich variety of settings, subjects, and styles.

This course introduces students to various literary traditions of writing about the visual arts, from the close analysis of images in novels, poems, and essays to verbal forms (such as ekphrasis and calligrammes) that make poetry and fiction out of paintings, photographs, and sculptures. While the puzzle of translating between space-based and time-based arts will be at the centre of our inquiry, the course will also consider texts and books as visual objects; how writers create visual experiences and mental images; and how literary writing is inspired by museums and exhibitions. Students will have opportunities to practice writing about the arts in collaboration with the Blackwood Gallery at UTM and its featured artists, and, when possible, with other Peel Region and Greater Toronto Area artists and galleries.

This course examines the deep history and extraordinary diversity of interactive storytelling, with a focus on narrative art in digital games, transmedia/cross-platform projects, alternate reality and pervasive games, theme parks, and immersive performances, as well as literary texts and films. We will consider forms (e.g., riddles, parables, metafiction, branching narratives) that require participatory agency, choice-based and emergent storytelling, as well as genres (e.g., creation myths, planetary romances, travelogues, adventure fiction, Expressionist cinema) that discover or assemble a narrative by traversing a world. We will also explore the contexts and theoretical grounds of reader- and player-centric approaches.

This course introduces students to Shakespeare. Lectures equip them with historical knowledge about literature, politics, and the theatre in Shakespeare's time. Tutorials help them to grapple with Shakespeare's language, versification, and stagecraft. By the end of the course students will have a new framework within which to understand - and interrogate - the enduring power of Shakespeare's work.

A critical and historical introduction to works written and created for or appropriated by children, from early didactic forms through the “Golden Era” to 20th-century fiction and contemporary works that centre non-white identities and experiences. The course may include fiction, poetry, drama, non-fiction, and visual media, and may cover works by authors such as John Bunyan, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Lucy Maud Montgomery, A.A. Milne, Louise Fitzhugh, Salman Rushdie, Cherie Dimaline, Aviaq Johnston, Katherina Vermette, Audrey Thomas, Jason Reynolds, Hanna Alkaf, Namina Forna.

An introduction to the writing and sequential art of comics and graphic novels, this course includes fictional and nonfictional comics by artists such as Will Eisner, Art Spiegelman, Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Julie Doucet, Marjane Satrapi, Chester Brown and Seth.