Graduate Courses Offered in 2026-2027
Graduate Course Offerings 2026-2027
GRADUATE COURSE OFFERINGS 2026/2027
Thunder Bay
FALL
ENGL 5770-FA: Advanced Scholarly Methods
Instructor: Dr. Douglas Ivison (telepresence)
Students will be offered instruction in graduate-level research, writing, and reading skills. An overview of major modes of literary studies scholarship will be provided with special attention paid to: conceptualizing a research project; accessing and evaluating primary and secondary sources; and planning, drafting, and revising proposals and essays. The course content will build toward a conference of student work.
ENGL 5018-FDE / Social Justice 5018-FDE: Radical Imagination in Art and Activism
Instructor: Dr. Max Haiven (zoom)
What does it mean to be an internationalist? What has it meant to people around the world who have struggled for a better world? What might internationalism mean today, in an age of surging fascism, a livestreamed genocide, and an ecological catastrophe? How have artists, intellectuals and grassroots movements conceived of internationalism, dreamt it, represented it, practiced it, lived and died for it? What can their imaginations offer us, today? In this interdisciplinary course we will strive to ask deeper questions through an engagement with literature, art, theory and history.
ENGL 5211-FA: Sex and Gender on the Early Modern Stage
Instructor: Dr. Rachel Warburton (telepresence)
Contact Dr. Rachel Warburton for further information
ENGL 5510-FA: Housing India
Instructor: Dr. Anna Guttman (telepresence)
While shelter is an essential human need, much like food, a house is much more than a physical structure. Home can be a site of belonging, privacy, safety and cultural expression, but also of labour, surveillance and abuse. A dwelling can be a place of familial relations, but also of co-living amongst friends or strangers. Through an examination of recent literature, film and culture, this course examines apartments and apartment buildings as contested spaces in contemporary India, the world’s most populous country. With the world’s fastest growing economy, India and its cities have undergone a rapid, and controversial, transformation. Issues to be addressed will include homelessness, gentrification, class relations, religious communities, gender, sexuality, privacy and urban crime.
WINTER
ENGL 5010-WA: Life Writing
Instructor: Dr. Scott Pound (seminar)
Life Writing: a writing course focused on the genres of memoir and autotheory (the commingling of theory and philosophy with autobiography). Supplemented and informed by critical resources from the field of autobiography studies, students will study a range of contemporary examples of memoir and autotheory and pursue a process-based approach to developing their own finished product in one of these forms. Careful reading of exemplar texts will form the basis for discussions about queer, socialist, somatic, affective, decolonial, and feminist ways of inhabiting and writing about “life” and the creative/critical practices writers use to broach complex realities of love, loss, intimacy, religion, sexuality, identity, illness, power, violence, and family. Our primary goal will be to develop critical and creative skills that can be put to work in our writing as we strive to understand the ways narratives both construct and contest what is normative and the varying ways writers working in this register navigate the boundary between the personal and the public.
ENGL 5110-WDE Medieval Scottish Poetry
Instructor: Dr. Douglas Hayes (zoom)
This seminar will focus on the poetry of the Scots Makars, a somewhat disparate group of poets from 15th and 16th-century Scotland who, beginning in the 18th century, have been taken to represent the “Golden Age” of Scottish literature. Indeed, even today their work is widely read and discussed in terms of Scottish identity, culture, and national independence, and the language of their poetry, “Inglis” in their own term and “Middle Scots” from a modern scholarly perspective, has often been at the centre of these discussions. We will read selected works from Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas in an effort to see their work both within its own literary and cultural context and that which has grown up around it in the centuries since.
ENGL 5611-WDE: African American Women Writers
Instructor: Dr. Sarah Olutola (zoom)
A study of seminal works from African-American women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries.
ENGL 5750-WA/INDI 5720-WA/ SOCJ 5720-WA: Tricksters in Indigenous Literature
Instructor: Dr. Judith Leggatt (telepresence)
In this course, we will study the ways in which Indigenous writers use traditional trickster figures in contemporary literary and cultural storytelling genres. We will begin with an examination of a traditional trickster cycle. We will then move on to 20th and 21st Century Indigenous storytelling, which we will study in the context of a variety of anthropological, cultural, nationalist, aesthetic and literary theories about tricksters.
Orillia
FALL
ENGL 5770-FAO: Advanced Scholarly Methods
Instructor: Dr. Douglas Ivison (telepresence)
Students will be offered instruction in graduate-level research, writing, and reading skills. An overview of major modes of literary studies scholarship will be provided with special attention paid to: conceptualizing a research project; accessing and evaluating primary and secondary sources; and planning, drafting, and revising proposals and essays. The course content will build toward a conference of student work.
ENGL 5018-FDE / Social Justice 5018-FDE: Radical Imagination in Art and Activism
Instructor: Dr. Max Haiven (zoom)
What does it mean to be an internationalist? What has it meant to people around the world who have struggled for a better world? What might internationalism mean today, in an age of surging fascism, a livestreamed genocide, and an ecological catastrophe? How have artists, intellectuals and grassroots movements conceived of internationalism, dreamt it, represented it, practiced it, lived and died for it? What can their imaginations offer us, today? In this interdisciplinary course we will strive to ask deeper questions through an engagement with literature, art, theory and history.
ENGL 5010-FAO: Nature Poetry
Instructor: Dr. Shannon Webb-Campbell (seminar)
What is nature? How does nature inform poetry? Can poetry help us navigate human nature, animal nature, plant nature and landscapes? What creates poetic nature? How are poetry and rewilding connected? In this course we will strive to ask deeper questions through an engagement of poetry and nature to help us reconnect, restore and respect our individual and collective place.
ENGL 5211-FAO: Sex and Gender on the Early Modern Stage
Instructor: Dr. Rachel Warburton (telepresence)
Contact Dr. Rachel Warburton for further information
ENGL 5510-FA: Housing India
Instructor: Dr. Anna Guttman (telepresence)
While shelter is an essential human need, much like food, a house is much more than a physical structure. Home can be a site of belonging, privacy, safety and cultural expression, but also of labour, surveillance and abuse. A dwelling can be a place of familial relations, but also of co-living amongst friends or strangers. Through an examination of recent literature, film and culture, this course examines apartments and apartment buildings as contested spaces in contemporary India, the world’s most populous country. With the world’s fastest growing economy, India and its cities have undergone a rapid, and controversial, transformation. Issues to be addressed will include homelessness, gentrification, class relations, religious communities, gender, sexuality, privacy and urban crime.
WINTER
ENGL 5110-WDE Medieval Scottish Poetry
Instructor: Dr. Douglas Hayes (zoom)
This seminar will focus on the poetry of the Scots Makars, a somewhat disparate group of poets from 15th and 16th-century Scotland who, beginning in the 18th century, have been taken to represent the “Golden Age” of Scottish literature. Indeed, even today their work is widely read and discussed in terms of Scottish identity, culture, and national independence, and the language of their poetry, “Inglis” in their own term and “Middle Scots” from a modern scholarly perspective, has often been at the centre of these discussions. We will read selected works from Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas in an effort to see their work both within its own literary and cultural context and that which has grown up around it in the centuries since.
ENGL 5611-WDE: African American Women Writers
Instructor: Dr. Sarah Olutola (zoom)
A study of seminal works from African-American women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries.
ENGL 5750-WAO/INDI 5720-WAO/ SOCJ 5720-WAO: Tricksters in Indigenous Literature
Instructor: Dr. Judith Leggatt (telepresence)
In this course, we will study the ways in which Indigenous writers use traditional trickster figures in contemporary literary and cultural storytelling genres. We will begin with an examination of a traditional trickster cycle. We will then move on to 20th and 21st Century Indigenous storytelling, which we will study in the context of a variety of anthropological, cultural, nationalist, aesthetic and literary theories about tricksters.