Graduate Courses Offered in 2023-2024

ENGL 5010 - Special Topics in Creative Writing: Life Writing - Dr. Scott Pound

A course in nonfiction storytelling focused on the genres of memoir and autotheory, supplemented with critical resources from the field of memoir and autobiography studies. Students will study a range of contemporary examples of memoir and autotheory (the commingling of theory and philosophy with autobiography) and pursue a process-based approach to the developing their own finished product in one of these forms.  Careful reading of the following texts will for the basis for creative and critical discussions:  Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of my Brief Body, Alison Bechdel, Fun Home; Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts; Anne Boyer, The Undying; Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy; Kiese Laymon, Heavy; and Hua Hsu, Stay True.

ENGL 5090 Special Topics in Children's LiteratureChildren's Literature and Social Mobility - Dr. Chris Parkes

This course will examine important children's texts from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century that focus on issues concerning social class and employment. Authors, Robert Louis Stevenson, Frances Hodgson Bennett and E. Nesbit focused in the issue of growing up to take one's position in the labour market and in doing so helped to construct the modern concept of the child as a figure that must be granted opportunities for upward social mobility. 

ENGL 5211 - Special Topics in 17th Century Literature: Staging Early Modern Prostitution - Dr. Rachel Warburton

This seminar will examine several early modern plays that feature prostitution.

ENGL/SOCJ 5212 - Special Topics in Cultural Studies and Social Justice: Terror and Technology - Dr. Monica Flegel

This course will examine the horror genre, specifically focusing on its relationship to technology. This will include examining how horror has been taken up and transformed via new media, such as blogs, podcasts, web-comics, YouTube videos and online communities.  How does the horror genre use new forms to express contemporary anxieties and fears about and/or subvert dominant narratives of race, gender, and class?

ENGL/SOCJ 5218 - Special Topics in Environmental Literatures: Narratives of Climate Crisis - Dr. Douglas Ivison  

The climate crisis is one of the most prominent issues of our era and an increasing number of texts in a variety of genres and media have engaged directly or indirectly with climate change from a variety of perspectives, advocating action to prevent or mitigate it, exploring its implications of human societies and the more-than-human world, imagining adaptation and apocalypse, etc.  Accounts of the climate crisis frequently function as a means of discussing other issues; modernity, capitalism, consumerism, industrialization, humanity's relationship to 'nature', technology, culture, geopolitics, European imperialism, white supremacy, American power, and racial, social, and environmental justice. In this course we will read a range of texts addressing the climate crisis, potentially including literary and popular fiction, criticism and theory, memoir and journalism, manifestos, and documentary and narrative film.

ENGL/SOCJ 5750 Special Topics in First Nations Literature: Indigenous Futurisms - Dr. Judith Leggatt

Indigenous Futurism combines speculative imaginings of the future with decolonization and emphasizes the interrelationship of past, present, and future in Indigenous culture and thought. In this class we will examine Indigenous futurism through textual analysis of Indigenous speculative fiction, visual storytelling, and digital media. We will use close reading of texts by writers such as Cherie Demaline, Chelsea Vowel, Daniel Heath Justice, Drew Hayden Taylor and Waubgeshig Rice to examine relationships between Indigenous futurism and speculative fiction. Some recurring themes of the texts include Indigenous understandings of time, Indigenous scientific literacies, relationships with the non-human (animals, aliens, and ai), and balancing utopianism and dystopianism.

ENGL 5770 FDE – Advanced Scholarly Methods – Dr. Rachel Warburton - Zoom

This course will offer instruction in graduate-level research, writing, and reading skills. The course will provide an overview of major modes of literary studies scholarship 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 will build toward a conference of student work.

** This is a required course for all first-year graduate students. Students who have taken English 5790 are not required to take English 5770.