Graduate Courses
Summer 2026 Graduate Courses
EH 590: WOMEN'S BODIES IN HISTORICAL FICTION || HALBROOKS
MW 2:30 - 5:00
FULL SUMMER TERM: JUNE 3 - JULY 31
“Nothing in man—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men,” writes Foucault. If we mentally edit this language to include women, then this becomes an even richer claim, as gender, of course, is a central aspect of the discourse of the self. Considered from this perspective, historical fiction becomes a more complex challenge than a typical costume drama might suggest. When the historical body disappears, how do we make sense of the historical subject? This course will examine how writers of historical fiction reimagine the bodies of women in the past, focusing on three novels: Lauren Groff’s Matrix, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and Toni Morrison’s A Mercy. Half of the course will be remote, as students prepare presentations for a research colloquium at the end of the term.
Fall 2026 Graduate Courses
EH 502: GRADUATE WRITING FOR ENGLISH || McLAUGHLIN
W 6:00 - 8:30
EH 502 is required of all M.A. students in their first year of course work. The central purpose of this course is to prepare students for research and academic writing at the graduate level, but it also aims to prepare students for direct engagement with the academic conversations, discourses, and practices that circulate around and through the study of literary texts—in this case, the filmic texts of auteurs who handle sound and vision in unique ways.
EH 505: TEACHING COLLEGE WRITING || SHAW
MW 2:30 - 3:45
This course examines issues in composition history, theory, and pedagogy in the context of teaching first-year composition. Students will use this knowledge to develop course material appropriate to teaching first-year composition. Topics include syllabus and assignment design, lesson planning, course management, teaching in the linguistically and culturally diverse classroom, and assessment. Pre-requisite / Co-requisite: EH 502.
EH 520: STUDIES IN SHAKESPEARE || HILLYER
R 6:00 - 8:30
The centerpiece of this course will be Shakespeare’s comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor, often classified as the most realistic of all his plays. We will contextualize it in three different ways. First, we will track the emergence of the play’s comedic butt (Sir John Falstaff) over the course of Shakespeare’s second tetralogy (Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, Henry V). Next, we will watch Orson Welles’s brilliant Falstaff-themed film Chimes at Midnight. Finally, we will ponder selected chapters from Erich Auerbach’s classic Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.
EH 551: AFRICAN AMERICAN LIT TO 1900 || VRANA
TR 2:00 - 3:15
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American writers were among the most important pioneers helping to forge our nation’s literary traditions, so why are they often overlooked? EH 490/591 will examine this question through works that are vital to early Black literary history and all American history, including poetry by revolutionary voices like Phillis Wheatley and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, autobiographies by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, and fiction.
EH 572: MODERN AMERICAN FICTION || RACZKOWSKI
T 6:00 - 8:30
The modernist novel in the United States was never singular, but took on a number of forms ranging from the experimental or “high” modernism of Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner; to the popular modernism of Anita Loos; to the Harlem Renaissance modernism of Nella Larsen and Rudolph Fisher. As a study of modernist fiction in America, the goal of this class will be to introduce students to some of these different modernisms while keeping an eye on the competing aesthetic and political arguments that modernist writers structured implicitly in their fiction and explicitly in their manifestoes, reviews and literary criticism.
EH 583/4: GRADUATE FICTION WRITING WORKSHOP I/II || CULLITY
T 6:00 - 8:30
The goal of this class is to introduce you to writing in a longer form than short fiction or poetry or essays allow. We will scaffold complete novels and workshop the first chapters of each novel manuscript together. Core to this course’s aims is the development of critical capacities as well as a solid sense of invention and intervention. This class will take you to the next level in developing creative work.
EH 591: HYBRID FORMS || JORGENSEN
M 6:00 - 8:30
This course explores the various hybrid forms: the prose poem, lyric essay, and verse novel— among many others. By looking at the conventions that cross genre-lines in hybrid forms, writers come to better understand the genres in which they regularly work. The hybrid forms studied will include elements of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and visual art. Students will also have the opportunity to workshop pieces written in the forms studied.
