First year courses

Literature courses

Writing courses

English 1014: Introduction to Creative Writing

Second Year Courses

ENGL 2115 FA/FAO - Shakespeare

ENGL 2250 FA/FAO - History of Literature 1

ENGL 2251 FAO - History of Literature 2

ENGL/INDI 2510 - Global Literatures in English

ENGL/INDI 2717 FAO - Indigenous Literature in Canada 

ENGL/WOME 2810FA: Gender, Sexuality & the Body

ENGL 2817 FA/FAO Creative Writing: Creative Nonfiction

ENGL 2913 FA/FAO Intro Lit and Cultural Theories

ENGL 2916 FAO Popular Texts and Forms

WINTER 2025:

ENGL 2011/INDI 2010 WA - Indigenous Representation in Media 

"An examination of historical and contemporary representations of Indigenous people and the ways in which non-Indigenous people have constructed ideas of "Nativeness/Indianness" and communicated them through literature, film, television, and other forms of media using a critical discourse analysis. An exploration of racial stereotypes, cultural appropriation, and how Indigenous peoples have employed art, literature, and film as sites of cultural resistance and resurgence"

ENGL 2012 WA - Creative Writing: Prose

ENGL 2013 WAO - Creative Writing: Poetry

ENGL 2250 WAO - History of Literature 1

ENGL 2251 WA/WAO - History of Literature 2

ENGL/INDI 2717 WA - Indigenous Literature in Canada
ENGL/WOME 2810 WAO - Gender, Sexuality and the Body

ENGL 2913 WAO - Intro to Literary and Cultural Theories

ENGL 2916 WA - Popular Texts and Forms

ENGL 2917 WAO/WDE - Children's Literature

ENGL/MDST 2950 WDE - Science Fiction

Third year courses

Fall 2025

Winter 2025

ENGL 3011 WA - Life Writing
     "A community service learning writing course in which students partner with hospice volunteers and their clients to conduct life review exercises and create legacy projects. Students will learn the fundamentals of the memoir genre and work to develop their writing skills on two fronts: by writing a personal memoir and by completing a legacy project for their community client.
ENGL 3017 WAO - The Short Story
ENGL 3051 WA/WAO - 18th Century Women's Writing
     "This course is a study of selected British women who wrote and published from 1700 to 1800.  Whereas only a few upper-class women wrote and even fewer published their works at the beginning of the century, by the end many women from all classes wrote extensively, some of them even earning a living by the pen.  Some of these women promote moral respectability, while others express energetic critiques of patriarchal gender constructs or offer perceptive suggestions for familial and global equality and freedom.  Noting the variances in women’s experiences, we will be examining selected contributions to various poetic and prose genres, exploring shifts from satire to sensibility, classicism to domesticity, and elevated verse to gothic romance. "

ENGL 3052 WDE - Memoirs of Forced Removal
  "Together we will explore the tenuous space that the genre of memoir inhabits. Precariously balancing between the private and the public, memoirs illuminate both the limits and power of memory. Memoirs are meticulously constructed to evoke emotion from the reader and push against comfortable national containers. Students will investigate Indian Residential Schools, Japanese Canadian Internment, Jewish Canadian Internment, the Stolen Generations, and the Rwandan Civil War, through the eyes of authors Edmund Metatawabin, Tom Sando, Otto Koch, Dianne O’Brien, and Clementine Wamariya. This course explores the construction of home and how the authors form their identity against and with the nation."

ENGL 3215 WA/WAO - 17th Century Literature
ENGL 3430 WA/WAO - Victorian Literature and Culture
ENGL/INDI/MDST 3750 WAO - 21st Century Indigenous Storytelling

Fourth year courses

Fall 2025:

ENGL 4012/INDI 4015 FA - Indigenous Storytelling and Pedagogy

ENGL 4013 FDE - Medieval Morality Plays

"The medieval morality play and later Tudor interlude rely on allegorical figures to

represent abstract moral concepts onstage for an audience that was inundated, via
sermons and popular literature, with instruction in right and wrong living. Figures such
as Mercy, dressed as a priest in the play Mankind (circa 1465), embody correct
theological interpretation and guidance in a dramatic setting. However, these plays are
frequently dominated by the Vice figure, the dramatic representation of evil in the plays.
Active, funny, and dangerously subversive, these figures are supposed to lure the
audience into complicity with sin, and they do their job well in many of these plays.

Indeed, they often upstage the “good” figures” who do not have enough of a dramatic
presence to counteract the effects of the Vice figures even though the static nature of
goodness is precisely what these plays try to emphasize. This course will focus on the
scope and effects of this “immorality” in these plays both as it occurs in the play texts
themselves and as early drama scholars have theorized it in the last twenty years."

ENGL 4014 FA/FAO - Anna Barbauld 

This course will focus on poetry and essays by Anna Letitia Barbauld who was initially
admired and later criticized by other British Romantic writers for her visions of social
justice. We will study works such as hymns and lessons for children; everyday-life
poems about liberty, fraternity, and equality; and revolutionary essays about political
issues and practical solutions.  Through Barbauld’s insight, we will learn how even the
most common life of women, men, mice, and caterpillars can establish community,
protect the environment, and promote fairness and kindness in the midst of adversity.

ENGL 4018 FDE - The Ghosts of Revolution
     "The world of ghosts in which we find ourselves today, with all its inequalities and oppressions, is the result of the vanquishing of innumerable revolutions and revolutionaries. In this course, we take up theory, film, literature, history and social science research to ask questions including: How do the ghosts of past revolts continue to haunt our present? How does this haunting express itself differently in diverse cultural contexts? Why do colonizers insist ghosts aren’t real? When and why do rebels believe that the dead rise with them to throw off the shackles of oppression? How have the creative arts represented (or hidden) these traces? What theories might help us understand what lies in the "wake” (Sharpe)? How do we settle the debts we owe to those who struggled before us (Benjamin)? And how might the “hauntology” (Derrida, Fisher) of past struggles generate new “spectres of revolt” (Gilman-Opalsky)?

ENGL 4115 FAO - The Lyric and the Lyrical

“Although all poets aspire to be birds, no bird aspires to be a poet,” writes Mary Ruefle.
This seminar will involve practical study of lyric poetry, a short poetic form with song-like
qualities that expresses personal emotions.
“The Lyric and the Lyrical” is a creative writing course that blends the complementary
practices of critical reading, listening to music and poetry. Through poetic strategies and
cross-sections of music, students will explore and experiment in the lyric form. In this
workshop-style course, students work collaboratively and independently to develop a
range of communication skills useful in both creative writing and related fields.
Through student-led presentations, studies of critically acclaimed lyric poetry, and
intensive creative writing workshops, each student will work towards writing a suite
and/or chapbook of lyric poetry. Students will also be given guidance on publishing
methods."

 Winter 2026:

ENGL 4010 WA - Contemporary Poets and Poetics

This course offers a close up look at poetry as it is made and read today. Our primary
focus will be on reading and discussing a selection of recently published poetry
collections, all of them excellent and challenging in very different ways. Discussions and
assignments will be structured around three sites of critical interest:
 How do poems work and how does one read them? How do we attune ourselves
to the images, sounds, and ideas running through poems? How do diction,
syntax, rhythm, image, voice, tone, irony, and figure contribute to the experience
and meaning of poetry?
 What kind of cultural work do poems perform? In what ways do poetry and
poetics function as a source of cultural, aesthetic, and political insight?  In what
ways do poems challenge us to think and feel about race, class, gender,
nationhood, sexuality, and politics?
 How does one participate in conversations (academic and otherwise) about
poems? What methods are available to us for reading the text? What aspects of
literary history, scholarship, poetics, theory, and criticism have been invoked in
existing scholarly conversations about poetic texts? What avenues remain
unexplored? What do you have to say about the text? In what ways does the
academic apparatus expand and/or exhaust our experience and enjoyment of
poetry? How else might we treat, use, and enjoy poetry?

ENGL 4013 WAO - Magic in Mediecal and Early Modern Literature

ENGL 4110 WA/WAO - The Animal Other

Animal stories have been popular throughout English literary history, even if animals
often play minor or marginal roles. This class will feature those texts that do center
animal lives and animal characters, from Christopher Smart's "On his cat, Jeoffrey"
(1762) to Anna Sewell's Black Beauty (1877) to Morrison and Quitely's graphic novel,
We3 (2004). Some questions we will consider: how do texts employ anthropomorphism
in their construction of animal characters? What role, if any, does ethology play in
animal representation? And can texts "speak for" the animal other in ways that radically
challenge anthropocentrism?

ENGL 4112 WA - Movie Musicals

ENGL/MDST 4114 WDE - Climate Film

Although marginalized in the Trump 2 era, climate change, or global warming, or the climate crisis, or the climate emergency, remains one of the most important issues facing contemporary society and films (and TV productions) have been amongst the most prominent climate change texts. In this course, we will discuss and critically engage with a range of 21^st century narrative and documentary climate films, as well as some selected readings. In doing so, we will focus on a diverse array of topics, including, among others, climate apocalypse, climate justice, climate activism, and climate skepticism/denial. 

ENGL 4115 WAO - The Novella