The English language belongs not just to the British colonizers, but to the artists and writers, the poets and politicians of the colonized world. From Rabindranath Tagore’s mystical poetry to Slumdog Millionaire, the styles and aesthetics of South Asian English are as vast as the peninsula itself, and the literature that has emerged from this diverse region has utterly reshaped contemporary global culture. Additionally, we will take up select contemporary criticism on subaltern studies, postcolonialism, and narratology. Authors will include Mulk Raj Anand, V.S. Naipaul, R.K. Narayan, Z.A. Suleri, Salman Rushdie, Anuradha Roy, Jjumpa Lahiri, as well as select works of poetry, film, and visual art.

This course explores a selection of writings in from medieval Britain, excluding the works of Chaucer.

A concentrated study of one aspect of medieval literature or literary culture, such as a particular genre or author, a specific theme, or the application of a particular critical approach. Topics may vary from year to year.

A concentrated study of one aspect of early modern British literature or literary culture, such as a particular subgenre or author, specific theme, or the application of a particular critical approach. Topics may vary from year to year.

A concentrated study of one aspect of eighteenth-century British literature or literary culture, such as a particular subgenre or author, specific theme, or the application of a particular critical approach. Topics may vary from year to year.

A concentrated study of one aspect of nineteenth-century British literature or literary culture, such as a particular subgenre or author, specific theme, or the application of a particular critical approach. Topics may vary from year to year.

A concentrated study of one aspect of modern or contemporary literature or literary culture, such as a particular subgenre or author, specific theme, or the application of a particular critical approach. Topics may vary from year to year.

This course compares works of selected playwrights of the Global South in an effort to understand their refashioning of postcolonial perspectives and subaltern histories. Ranging beyond the West and its theatrical traditions, the course will explore innovative theatrical performances that focus on South-South affiliations and link discourses, places, and people positioned between peripheries. Students will learn about traditions of orality, cultural pluralities, and indigenous mythic/folk styles that constitute the unique syncretism of South-South theatre cultures. Writers may include Manjula Padmanabhan, Shahid Nadeem, Meng Jinghui, Dalia Taha, Athol Fugard, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Derek Walcott, José Triana, and Ariel Dorfman.

A study of poems, novels, dramas, and prose works by British and American authors such as Mary Astell, Aphra Behn, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Eliza Haywood, Hannah More, Judith Sargent Murray, Mercy Otis Warren, Charlotte Smith, Phyllis Wheatley, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Topics may include professionalization and the literary marketplace; domestic labour; motherhood and children’s literature; class and education; personal agency and political engagement; colonialism, slavery, and abolition; Bluestocking culture; and early feminist thought.

This course investigates representation and identity in and through digital games. Students will primarily consider gender, race, sexuality, and the non-human world in relation to the complex circuits of desire, projection, and disguise that exist among players, avatars, non-player characters, and other gamers. Students will interpret and critique both blockbuster AAA games with large development budgets and production teams as well as small-scale indie and experimental games and will learn about expressive, critical, and avant-garde design and play practices. The class will also discuss games as instruments of persuasion, protest, social change, and community formation.

This course focuses on transformations of major literary forms during the sixteenth century, especially on how these transformations involve engagements with medieval and earlier materials. It covers such topics as Petrarchan poetry in translation by Wyatt and Surrey; John Fox's and John Bale's repackaging of Anne Askew's biography; and the work of Ovid and other classical authors in translation and adaptation, as in the Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis.

This course studies the emergence of prose fiction as a genre recognized in both a literary and a commercial sense. Authors may include Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Walter Scott, and Jane Austen. 

A study of selected novels by Jane Austen and of works by such contemporaries as Radcliffe, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Edgeworth, Scott, and Shelley, in the context of the complex literary, social, and political relationships of that time.

A concentrated study of one facet of Game Studies, such as a genre, mechanic, or era in gaming, an aspect of game design, production, or reception, or the application of a specific critical approach. Topics may vary from year to year.

This course surveys several major novels in order to understand the genre that came to dominate literary culture in the Victorian era. Topics may include realism, the marriage plot, the social-problem novel, feminism and sexual identity, novels of growing up, the city, and seriality. Authors may include Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, and Oscar Wilde, among others. 

This course approaches the premodern period by examining early British literatures alongside literary works of the period c.500-1650 from the continents of Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Texts may include Tang dynasty poetry, the Tale of Genji, the Persian epic Shahnameh, the Italian Decameron, 1001 Nights, Old Norse sagas, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and Harriot's Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. Texts will be provided in translation where necessary.

Sometimes thought of as the foundation of English poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer’s life and work in the late 14th century may seem remote from the 21st. Yet, Chaucer continues to be read, retold, and reinterpreted today, both in the academy and in popular culture. This course will consider Chaucer’s work and its modern retellings to ask how and why he continues to matter. Alongside readings of Chaucer’s original poetry, we will consider modern adaptations and translations of his work into various media from film to hip-hop, Chaucer’s reappearance and uses in global contexts, and reinterpretations of his life and works amidst rapidly shifting political and cultural realities.

This course introduces students to the planning and implementation of writing for video games as well as the role of the narrative designer in game development. Students will practice multiple collaborative forms of game writing (e.g., flow charts, quest outlines, character descriptions, flavour text, non-player character dialogue, cut scenes, storyboard scripts), level design, and player experience creation. Students will learn to use design and editing tools as well as iterative processes of revising game writing to augment gameplay and game features. Students will also learn to analyze and critique diverse game narratives and will discuss careers in game writing.

This course explores six or more works by at least four British contemporary writers of fiction.

Texts and performances preceding and underlying the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including creation-to-doomsday play cycles; plays performed in parishes, inns, great halls, outdoor arenas, and at court; religious and political propaganda plays; political pageants. Attention is given to social, political, and theatrical contexts.

This course explores English drama to the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, with attention to such playwrights as John Lyly, Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare.

This course engages with British poetry and prose ca. 1660-1800. Topics may include the flourishing of print culture; satirical and sentimental literature; the "rise" of the novel; art and aesthetics; science and technology; colonialism, slavery, and abolition; and women writers. Authors may include Aphra Behn, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, and Frances Burney.

This course explores novels by such writers as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Willa Cather, Edmund Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, David Lawrence, and William Faulkner. 

This course studies Indigenous literatures from around the world. Regions may include the Americas, the Pacific Islands, New Zealand, Australia, Asia, Africa, Russia, and Scandinavia. Through these literatures, the course addresses topics such as: the specific and localized ways colonialism manifests and exerts power; UNDRIP (the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples); the distinct experiences, histories, storytelling traditions, and decolonization processes of Indigenous peoples from different regions; how and why decolonization processes shift from one part of the world to another; and movements and experiences that bring Indigenous peoples from various regions together in solidarity.

This course explores English drama from the death of Queen Elizabeth I to the closing of the theatres, with attention to such playwrights as Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare, and John Webster. 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.

A study of drama and theatrical performance from 1660-1800, featuring works by authors such as Aphra Behn, Susannah Centlivre, William Congreve, Hannah Cowley, John Gay, George Lillo, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Richard Steele, and William Wycherley. Students can expect to learn about the modes of drama practiced during this period and their intersection with sexuality and gender, class, economics, politics, colonialism, and national identity. Students will also learn about theatre history, including the advent of female performers, changing theatre construction, the Licensing Act and theatrical censorship, the rise of the celebrity actor, and the popularization of Shakespeare.

This course offers an immersive study of spoken word poetry and orature, with a focus on providing an opportunity to practice writing and performing in a workshop environment. Through a combination of assignments, readings, presentations, discussions, and peer feedback, students are invited to develop their unique creative voice and performance style while exploring a variety of spoken word approaches and influences.

A study of poems, plays, prose fiction, and polemical works by medieval and early modern writers such as Anne Askew, Mary Wroth, Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Sidney, Amelia Lanyer, Lucy Hutchinson, Hester Pulter, and Margaret Cavendish. Topics may include race, women and science, love poetry from a female perspective, gender and trans studies, renarrations of the story of Eve, sexuality, and editorial history and practice.

This course analyzes plays and productions from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century primarily in Europe, England, and the United States. Starting with the flourishing of realism and naturalism, we will trace the rapid evolution of dramatic form and its relationship to new approaches to acting, directing, and theatrical design. We will examine the interdependency of theatre and the other arts and media as well as drama’s contributions to and invention of artistic movements. Playwrights considered may include Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Bernard Shaw, Anton Chekhov, Eugene O’Neill, Gertrude Stein, Bertolt Brecht, Tennessee Williams, Caryl Churchill, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

A study of ten or more plays by at least six recent dramatists.