Fall Term 2025

Instructor: Deidre Lynch and Neel Mukherjee Monday & Wednesday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: TBD All literature was contemporary at some point, but the literature that is contemporary now provides special opportunities for enjoying, questioning, and...

Spring 2026 Section 1 Instructor: Glenda Carpio Tuesday & Thursday, 1:30-2:45pm Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Section 2 Instructor: Christopher Pexa Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:15pm Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Fall 2025 Instructor: Leah...

Instructor: Alan Niles Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:15pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students This course, taught in small groups and required for concentrators, introduces theories, interpretive frameworks, and central questions about...

Instructor: Nicholas Watson Tuesday & Thursday, 9:00-10:15am | Location: TBD What makes stories so pleasurable and revealing but also so enraging and dangerous? How are we to think about the strong emotions they evoke and learn to resist as well as...

Instructor: Deidre Lynch Monday & Wednesdays 10:30-11:45 am | Location: TBD Why study monsters? Though modern peoples don’t fear monsters and indeed don’t even believe in them (or so we tell ourselves), monsters have nonetheless done an awfully good job...

Instructor: Tara K. Menon Tuesday & Thursday, 9:00-10:15am | Location: TBD Cities are made of contradictions: playgrounds for the rich and sites of concentrated poverty, highly organized and totally chaotic, an endless party and the loneliest places on...

Instructor: Vidyan Ravinthiran Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:15pm | Location: TBD Although this course does discuss blockbuster games, it’s primarily concerned with indie titles prioritizing discovery over system mastery—asking us to think differently...

Instructors: Leah Whittington, Ann Blair Monday & Wednesday, 3:00-4:15 pm | Location: TBD We live in a moment of “crisis” around regimes of preservation and loss. As our communication becomes ever more digital— and, therefore, simultaneously more...

Instructor: Beth Blum Monday & Wednesday, 10:30-11:45 am | Location: TBD How have authors throughout history channeled anxiety into meaningful and imaginative works of art? The poet WH Auden described the 1940s as “the age of anxiety,” but he could have...

Instructors: Jonathan Bolton, Glenda Carpio, David Elmer, Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Menand, Tara Menon Tuesday, 10:30-11:45am | Location: TBD A Humanities Colloquium: from Homer to Joyce: 2,500 years of essential works, taught by six professors...

Instructors: Neel Mukherjee and Laura van den Berg Monday & Wednesday, 10:30-11:45am | Location: TBD There is no writing without reading. This is a fact that all writers know. Ask any writer why they became a writer, and they'll tell you that it's because...

Instructor: Nicholas Watson Fall 2026 Wednesday, 9:00-11:45am | Location: TBD Spring 2026 Wednesday, 9:45-11:45 am | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Julian of Norwich (born 1343) and Margery Kempe of Lynn (born 1373) are the two earliest...

Instructor: Ju Yon Kim Tuesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students This seminar will explore Asian American theater and performance, including drama, musicals, and experimental performances. We will examine how Asian American...

Instructor: Gordon Teskey Monday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students How did Shakespeare’s art develop in the years following Hamlet (1600-1601), which ends with a roar of cannons, warning of great tragedies to come? The...

Instructor: Vidyan Ravinthiran Monday, 12:00-2:00pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students This course introduces students to the poetry, literary prose, and artful correspondence of one of the major poets of the twentieth century, considering...

Instructor: James Wood Monday, 3:45-5:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students In this seminar, we look at the ways in which a range of writers represent the mind on the page: the mind at thought, in agitation, at rest, at prayer, in...

Instructor: Stephanie Burt Wednesday, 3:00 - 5:45 pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Queer, trans, genderfluid, lesbian, gay, bi, pan and ace or aro authors and creators who made their gender and sexuality important to their writings...

The Supervising Reading and Research tutorial is a type of student-driven independent study offering individual instruction in subjects of special interest that cannot be studied in regular courses. English 91r is supervised by a member of the English...

Fall 2026 Junior Tutorials To be Announced

Supervised individual tutorial in an independent scholarly or critical subject. Students on the honors thesis track will register for English 99r in both the fall and spring terms.

Instructor: Nicholas Watson Fall 2026 Wednesday, 9:00-11:45am | Location: TBD Spring 2026 Wednesday, 9:45-11:45 am | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Julian of Norwich (born 1343) and Margery Kempe of Lynn (born 1373) are the two earliest...

Instructor: Stephen Greenblatt and Joseph Koerner Wednesday, 9:45-11:45 am | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students People change. They grow up and grow old, each differently but in ways divisible into stages. Different cultures and different...

Instructor: Nicholas Watson Thursday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students A study of a series of visionary works from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, including Guillaume de Lorris’s Romance of the Rose , Dante...

Instructor: Gordon Teskey Monday, 3:45-5:45 pm | Location: TBD In an age of scientific and political revolution, how do poets respond when common beliefs about God, humans, cosmic and social order, consciousness, and gender have been taken away? Modern...

Instructor: Elaine Scarry Thursday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Approaches Hardy's novels, stories, and narrative poems through the language of the senses (hearing, vision, touch) and through moral agency (philosophic...

Instructor: Stephanie Burt Tuesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students What is poetry? What is lyric? Who cares, and why? How have the answers to those questions changed since people began writing verse in English? We will...

Instructor: Philip Fisher Wednesday, 9:45-11:45 am | Location: TBD Is the complexity, the imperfection, the difficulty of interpretation, the unresolved meaning found in certain great and lasting works of literary art a result of technical experimentation...

Instructor: Anna Wilson Tuesday, 9:45-11:45 am | Location: TBD Fanfiction is one of the most popular forms of literature today, with fourteen million stories hosted on just the Archive of Our Own (one of the major digital fanfiction archives). Including...