Graduate Courses Offered in 2025-2026

Thunder Bay
FALL

ENGL 5770-FA: Advanced Scholarly Methods

Instructor: Daniel Hannah (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: The Ghosts of Revolution

Instructor: Max Haiven (zoom)
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 5110-FDE Medieval Morality Plays

Instructor: Douglas Hayes (zoom)
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 5216-FA: Anna Barbauld

Instructor: Alice den Otter (telepresence)
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.

WINTER

ENGL 5210-WA/Social Justice 5210-WA: Radical Optimism?

Instructor: Rachel Warburton (telepresence)
Living in “unprecedented” times sucks. Post-pandemic life includes several ongoing
crises: the housing crisis; the opioid crisis; middle-class wage stagnation and the cost-
of-living crisis; underfunded medical care and education nearing collapse; not to
mention the looming climate crisis, and the apparent return of fascism. Despair seems
like a reasonable response.
And yet, humans have accomplished much. As a global community, we addressed acid
rain and the CFC-induced damage to the ozone layer. Numerous endangered species
have been brought back from the brink of extinction and their damaged habitats
restored. The rollout of the Covid vaccines was impressive (if unevenly distributed
globally). The BLM protests peacefully demanded justice. The shift to solar and wind
power is happening in some of the world’s largest economies (California and China).
Recent mass demonstrations in South Korea helped preserve democracy in that
country. Although it may seem naïve, hope and human connectedness are politically
urgent.
This course will discuss some of the following pressing questions: How can we live our
lives as engaged citizens without giving in to despair? How can we work together to
meet current challenges?

ENGL 5411-WA: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

Instructor: Scott Pound (in person)
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 5070-WA: The Animal Other

Instructor: Monica Flegel (telepresence)
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?

Orillia
FALL

ENGL 5770-FAO: Advanced Scholarly Methods

ENGL 5018-FDE / Social Justice 5018-FDE: The Ghosts of Revolution

ENGL 5110-FDE: Medieval Morality Plays

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 5010-FAO: The Lyric and the Lyrical

Instructor: Shannon Webb-Campbell (in person)
“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.

ENGL 5216-FAO: Anna Barbauld

ENGL 5210-WAO/Social Justice 5210-WAO: Radical Optimism?

mention the looming climate crisis, and the apparent return of fascism. Despair seems
like a reasonable response.
And yet, humans have accomplished much. As a global community, we addressed acid
rain and the CFC-induced damage to the ozone layer. Numerous endangered species
have been brought back from the brink of extinction and their damaged habitats
restored. The rollout of the Covid vaccines was impressive (if unevenly distributed
globally). The BLM protests peacefully demanded justice. The shift to solar and wind
power is happening in some of the world’s largest economies (California and China).
Recent mass demonstrations in South Korea helped preserve democracy in that
country. Although it may seem naïve, hope and human connectedness are politically
urgent.
This course will discuss some of the following pressing questions: How can we live our
lives as engaged citizens without giving in to despair? How can we work together to
meet current challenges?

ENGL 5110-WAO: Magic in Medieval and Early Modern Literature

Instructor: Kathryn Walton (in person)
The medieval and early modern periods are often seen as historical moments when
intense fears over magic and the supernatural inspired violent reactions and vicious
persecutions; images of witches being burnt or drowned in lakes are as closely
associated with the Middle Ages as images of knights jousting. However, magic and the
supernatural were not only accepted in the culture of medieval and early modern
England but subjects of entertainment and fascination. This course will introduce
students to the many and various ways that magic and the supernatural shape the
dominant forms of literature from those periods: from romance texts that feature magic
rings, invisibility cloaks, evil sorceresses, and magic swords, to religious texts that
depict women, men, and objects endowed with extraordinary supernatural power.
Through consideration of the way in which magic, the supernatural, and the occult
manifest themselves in medieval and early modern literature, this course will show how
closely magic is bound up not only in conceptions of religion and divinity, but also in
issues of gender, race, identity, authority, and power. The course will move from Old
English charms that seek to banish bothersome elves, to Middle English romances that
reanimate the dead, to depictions of fairies and fiends on the early modern stage.
Throughout, students will be immersed in the vibrant literary culture surrounding magic
in medieval and early modern England and consider where contemporary fascination
with magical forms finds its origin.

ENGL 5010-WAO: The Novella

Instructor: Sarah Olutola (in person)

This seminar is a practical study of ‘the novella,’ a fictional prose work longer than a
short story, but shorter than a traditional novel. Through student-led presentations,
studies of famous/critically acclaimed novellas, and intensive creative writing
workshops, each student will work towards writing and completing a novella between
20,000 and 40,000 words. Students will also be given guidance on methods of
publishing to potentially transition into becoming published authors.

ENGL 5070-WAO: The Animal Other