Fall Term 2026

English 20. Literary Forms

Fall 2026 Instructor: Vidyan Ravinthiran Monday & Wednesday, 3:00-4:15pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 27 students Spring 2027 Section 1 Instructor: Nicholas Watson TBD | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 27 students Section 2 Instructor...

English 97. Sophomore Tutorial: Literary Methods

Fall 2026 Instructor: Beth Blum Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:15pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Spring 2027 Section 1 Instructor: Homi Bhabha TBD | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Section 2 Instructor: Martin Puchner...

AFRAMER 10. Introduction to African American Studies

Instructor: Jesse McCarthy Fall 2026 TBD | Location: TBD Spring 2026 Monday & Wednesday, 10:30-11:45am | Location: TBD This course aims to provide an interdisciplinary examination of the complex array of African-American cultural and political practices...

AFRAMER 130x. Richard Wright: Literature, Philosophy, and Politics

Instructor: Glenda Carpio and Tommie Shelby Monday, 12:45-2:45 pm | Location: TBA This course examines the major fiction and nonfiction works of Richard Wright from a literary, philosophical, and political perspective. We will take an interdisciplinary...

English 102m. Introduction to Old English: Charms, Herbals, Folk Medicine, Miracle Cures

Instructor: Daniel Donoghue Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:15pm | Location: TBD This course combines language study with the investigation of a critical theme. The narratives set for translation provide a thematic coherence as we dig into the language of Old...

English 115b. Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales

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...

English 121s. Shakespeare from Beginning to End: A survey of works, both plays and poems, across his whole career.

Instructor: Stephen Greenblatt Tuesday & Thursday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: TBD We will begin with Shakespeare's brilliant early history play, Richard III , and read works from the full course of his career, sampling all of his major genres: comedies...

English 141. When Novels Were New

Instructor: Deidre Lynch Tuesday & Thursday, 10:30-11:45am | Location: TBD What was it like to read and write a novel at a moment before that term named a stable category and before the genre’s conventions were established? How did it feel to be a writer...

English 170se. American Literature & the Environment

Instructor: Sarah Hopkinson Fall 2026 Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:15pm | Location: TBD Spring 2026 Wednesday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: TBD What are the natural worlds that define America? How did these landscapes – the towering redwoods of California, the...

English 182. Science Fiction

Instructor: Stephanie Burt Monday & Wednesday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: TBD Utopias, dystopias, artificial intelligence, life on new planets, and much, much more-- from the late 19th century to the present, *mostly in novels and short stories but also in...

English 185rj. Race, Speech, and the Law

Instructor: Louis Menand Monday & Wednesday, 10:30-11:45am | Location: TBD Supreme Court cases on race relations and free speech from Dred Scott to the Harvard University cases. Did we go through a constitutional looking glass on January 20, 2025? If so...

English 188n. Beyond Settler Borders: an Introduction to Native American and Indigenous Studies

Instructors: Christopher Pexa Monday & Wednesday, 3:00-4:15pm | Location: TBD This course provides students with a general introduction to the historic and contemporary experiences of Indigenous peoples, with a focus on Indigenous peoples of various...

English 189vg. Video Game Storytelling

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...

English 191rw. How to Tell a Story

Instructors: Neel Mukherjee and Laura van den Berg Monday & Wednesday, 10:30-11:45 am | Location: TBD How to tell a story? How do writers discover character, imagine worlds, and shape narrative time? This open-enrollment creative writing course will focus...

GENED 1050. Act Natural

Instructor: David Levine Wednesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD How do we draw the line between being yourself and performing yourself, between acting and authenticity? “To thine own self be true,” runs the famous line in Hamlet. But which self? And why...

GENED 1133. Is the U.S. Civil War Still Being Fought?

Instructor: John Stauffer Monday & Wednesday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: TBD How and why does the U.S. Civil War continue to shape national politics, laws, literature, and culture---especially in relation to our understanding of race, freedom, and equality...

English 175a. Melville (Undergraduate/Graduate Seminar)

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...

English 180vw. Two Visionary Women: Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Company (Undergraduate/Graduate Seminar)

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...

English 90as. The American Short Story

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...

English 90cl. Comic Imagination Through the Middle Ages

Instructor: Daniel Donoghue Wednesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students. Bad puns. Blasphemy. Codpieces. Corpse humor. Cougars. Cuckolds. Fart jokes. Dominant ladies. Funny drunks. Hypocrites. Incredible sex. Over-clever...

English 90cnc. Conrad, Naipaul, Coetzee: Genealogies of the Global Imagination

Instructor: Homi Bhabha Thursday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students The novels of Conrad, Naipaul, and Coetzee have a particular value to contemporary discourses on global culture. Writing from specific historical and cultural...

English 90fg. Faulkner and the Southern Gothic

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...

English 90ik. Ibsen and Chekhov

Instructor: Derek Miller Tuesday, 9:45-11:45am | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students The plays of Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov effected an essential shift in the trajectory of Western dramatic writing. From a theater of melodrama and...

English 90ls. Literacy Stories

Instructor: Deidre Lynch Wednesday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students. This seminar explores literacy, literacy instruction, and literacy movements past and present, in theory and practice. Engaging with recent fictions and...

English 90lv. Consciousness in Fiction from Austen to Woolf

Instructor: James Wood Monday, 3:00-5:00pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students In this seminar, we’ll be looking 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...

English 90qm. Metaphysical Poetry: The Seventeenth-Century Lyric and Beyond

Instructor: Gordon Teskey Monday, 3:45-5:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students In an age of scientific and political revolution, how do poets respond when common beliefs about God, humans, cosmic and social order, consciousness, and...

English 90ww. Walt Whitman

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...

English 91r. Supervised Reading and Research

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...

English 98r. Junior Tutorial

Fall 2026 Junior Tutorials To be Announced

English 99r. Senior Tutorial

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.

English 175a. Melville (Undergraduate/Graduate Seminar)

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...

English 180vw. Two Visionary Women: Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Company (Undergraduate/Graduate Seminar)

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...

English 229s. Edmund Spenser and the Art of Theory

Instructor: Gordon Teskey Monday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students A seminar on the poetry of Spenser and the practice of theory. In contrast to Milton, Spenser thinks as he writes and also lets the poem think for him. He...

English 294z. On Beauty: Graduate Seminar

Instructor: Elaine Scarry Thursday, 3:00-5:00pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Philosophic and literary accounts of beauty from Greek through modern, including Plato, Aquinas, Dante, Kant, Keats, and Rilke. In addition, the major...

English 297cl. Critical Indigenous Theory

Instructor: Christopher Pexa Wednesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students This seminar gives a broad overview of key theoretical interventions in the emergent, international, and interdisciplinary field of Critical Indigenous...

English 298ai. Humanities AI Lab

Instructor: Martin Puchner Tuesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students This course explores the impact of AI on the humanities and seeks to articulate a humanities-based perspective on AI. This double mission includes...