Undergraduate Seminars

Instructor: Valeria Luiselli TBD | Location: TBD This is a course for anyone who is interested in the politics and aesthetics of sound. We will work on developing listening literacy as writers, thinking of it as a source of narrative craft. We will...

Instructor: Elaine Scarry TBD | Location: TBD How far narrative can accommodate and express the nature of human labor is explored in a study of three 19th-century British writers, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy, as well as in novels and short stories by...

Instructor: John Stauffer Thursday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students This course offers an introduction to and critical examination of Melville’s writings. Moby-Dick is the centerpiece of the course (and of Melville’s works...

Instructor: Stephanie Burt Tuesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students. One of the major poets in the English language, Whitman also became an emblem of an American possibility, a beacon of what we now call queer identities...

Instructor: Christopher Pexa TBD | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students. This course examines how contemporary Indigenous writers and writers of color deploy monstrosity as a powerful tool for critiquing systems of oppression and imagining...

Instructor: Sarah Hopkinson Thursday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students. William Faulkner’s South is a haunted place. In Yoknapatawpha – Faulkner’s imaginary county –we find confederate uniforms rotting inside wardrobes...

Instructor: Ju Yon Kim Wednesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students. This seminar will explore the American short story with a special focus on writers of the nineteenth century who were critical to establishing the short...

Instructor: David Levine Spring 2027 TBD | Location: TBD Spring 2026 Tuesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 14 students Students will gain facility with reading, speaking, performing, and directing Shakespeare through a simple task...

Instructor: Stephanie Burt Wednesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students What's a superhero and why do people care? Where do they come from, what do they do, and why would anyone ever choose to be one? We will follow those...

Instructor: Nicholas Watson Spring 2027 TBD | Location: TBD Spring 2026 Thursday, 9:45-11:45am | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Medieval romances are ancestors of the modern novel, including the psychological novel and the fictions we...