Section 1 Instructor: James Simpson
Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:15pm | Location: Barker 024
Course Website

Section 2 Instructor: Stephanie Burt
Monday & Wednesday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: Barker 024
Course Website

Enrollment: Each section is limited to 27 students

This foundational course for English concentrators examines literary form and genre. We explore some of the many kinds of literature as they have changed over time, along with the shapes and forms that writers create, critics describe, and readers learn to recognize. The body of the course looks to the great literary types, or modes, such as epic, tragedy, and lyric, as well as to the workings of literary style in moments of historical change, producing the transformation, recycling, and sometimes the mocking of past forms. While each version of English 20 includes a different array of genres and texts from multiple periods, those texts will always include five major works from across literary history: Beowulf (epic), King Lear (tragedy), Persuasion (comic novel), The Souls of Black Folk (essays; expository prose), and Elizabeth Bishop’s poems (lyric). The course integrates creative writing with critical attention: assignments will take creative as well as expository and analytical forms.

Note: English 20 is one of the required Common Courses for English concentrators and Secondaries in the Classes of 2023, 2024, and 2025 and is a limited enrollment course which will prioritize sophomores and first-years; juniors and seniors who want to take it as an elective will be considered for any remaining spots. Enrollment priority exceptions may be made for people changing concentrations or presenting other notable reasons

Instructor: Beth Blum
Tuesday & Thursday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: Sever 203
Course Website

Enrollment: Limited to 15 students

This course, taught in small groups and required for concentrators, introduces theories, interpretive frameworks, and central questions about literature and literary media. What do we do when we read? What is an author? What do we mean by “literature” itself? How might we compare and evaluate interpretations? How do the historical, social, cultural, and legal frameworks around a text shape its meanings and its effects? Combining major critical and theoretical writings with primary works, the course investigates how literary production and interpretation are informed by philosophical and aesthetic traditions, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, national and post-colonial identities, and the material forms in which literature circulates, from parchment books to the internet. Students will also practice fundamental literary research methods through close engagement with Harvard libraries.

Note: English 97 is one of the required Common Courses for English concentrators in the Classes of 2023, 2024, and 2025 and is open to sophomores and first-years planning to concentrate in English. Enrollment priority exceptions may be made for people changing concentrations or presenting other notable reasons.

Instructor: Kristen Carella
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 3:00-4:15pm | Location: Boylston 103
Course Website

Old English poems love to recycle age-old wisdom in what are called “gnomic” verses.  Usually expressed in laconic language and embedded in various genres of poems, the meaning of these passages can be unclear: Soð bið swicolost could be translated as “Truth is complicated.” Their prevalence, however, suggests that the wisdom they conveyed was held in universal esteem.  This course will examine the structure, content, and context of gnomic verses from multiple angles.  In addition to our daily translations, we will pursue questions such as: What are the sources of these passages?  What ideological/religious beliefs do they reflect?  How do they function within the various literary genres where they occur?  What is the importance of these passages in Beowulf?  We will also compare Old Norse/Icelandic and Old Irish wisdom literature (in translation) as we attempt to understand this fascinating and challenging aspect of Old English literature. Prerequisite: one term of Old English or the equivalent.

Note: English 102 is a prerequisite for English 103. Students who complete both English 102 and 103 with honors grades will fulfill the College language requirement and the English Department's Foreign Language Literature requirement.

Instructor: Leah Whittington & Vidyan Ravinthiran
Monday & Wednesday, 3:00-4:15pm | Location: Sever 107
Course Website

Epic is one of the most enduring and far-reaching forms of artistic expression. From the heroic poems of the ancient Near East to modern films of quest and adventure, epic speaks to the shared values and collective aspirations of cultures, peoples, and communities. But if it’s formal conventions and thematic interests endure, epic changes over time. In this course, you will study the historical and literary evolution of epic as it moves from oral verse into new genres and media, reading texts from the ancient Mediterranean alongside works of poetry, fiction, and cinema from early modern Britain, twentieth-century America, and the contemporary Global South. We will look at some texts in their entirety and others in extracts, focusing on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Vergil’s Aeneid, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, The Mahabharata (in prose and film versions), and George Lucas’ Star Wars, with detailed analysis of Gwendolyn Brooks’s American epics on Black life, Annie Allen and In the Mecca. If issues of identity, belonging, and community have always been explored in epic, what is the place of epic in a pluralist multi-culture? What are our contemporary epics today? 

Instructor: Alan Niles
Tuesday & Thursday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: Sever 208
Course Website

How did writers and audiences imagine the world before modernity? This course offers an introduction to the first 1000 years of English literature (roughly 700-1700) and the shifting terms through which writers were able to imagine the world beyond their borders. We will encounter hardy seafarers, fantastical monsters, and real and imagined peoples at the margins of Europe and beyond. We will study the genres of travel narrative, romance, epic, drama, and lyric, and the different ways these forms registered global connections, ideas of race, and cultural and religious difference. We will pay particular attention to the accelerated pace of global

encounters and connections starting in the Renaissance, and the ways that English literature was able (or not) to register new peoples and places, new forms of economic connectivity, and the violence of colonialism and empire.

Note: This course satisfies the English Concentration "Arrivals" requirement for the Class of 2022.

Instructor: Alan Niles
Tuesday & Thursday, 9:00-10:15am | Location: Sever 203
Course Website

This class is an introduction to Shakespeare’s writings and their representations of sex, gender, romance, love, and queerness. We will study poems about erotic and queer desire, plays that stage ideas about gender and gender fluidity, and film adaptations that bring modern perspectives to race and sexuality. Readings will include such plays as Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titus Andronicus, Macbeth, and Measure for Measure; Shakespeare’s Sonnets; and films by Derek Jarman, Baz Luhrmann, and Julie Taymor. Throughout our course, we will ask: how are the forms of gender identity and sexual expression we encounter in Shakespeare’s works familiar, or different? How might they challenge, inspire, or disturb us today?

Note: This course satisfies the English Concentration "Shakespeare" requirement for the Class of 2022.

Instructor: Tara Menon
Monday & Wednesday, 9:00-10:15am | Location: Sever 103
Course Website

What does the novel still have to offer? As newer genres—movies, television, Youtube, TikTok—compete for our attention, why do people still immerse themselves long works of prose fiction? And why do certain nineteenth-century British novels continue to captivate so many readers to this day? In this course, we will read five nineteenth-century novels by five authors that many consider to be the greatest writers that have ever lived: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. We will pay close attention to technique: how do these novels work? And we will also explore social and political themes: what are these novels about? At every stage, we will consider the unique capacities of narrative fiction: what can the novel do that other genres can’t? Implicitly and explicitly, this course will argue first, that these superlative nineteenth-century novels let us see the world (not only then but also now) in new ways, and second, that the novel is a tool for thinking that beats all others. Alongside these texts, we will watch film adaptations and read excerpts of contemporary criticism and fiction to better understand the enduring legacy of these canonical works.

Instructor: Derek Miller
Tuesday & Thursday, 10:30-11:45 am | Location: Emerson 101
Course Website

To many of its fans, Hamilton poses a problem. How can a show that presents so many talented artists of color still represent a white-washed American history? And how should we evaluate the show’s impact when sky-high ticket prices make it accessible primarily to a wealthy (read: white) audience? In its aspirational embrace of a multi-ethnic America and its failure fully to realize that promise itself, Hamilton embodies the paradox of Broadway.

This course examines that paradox since World War II, particularly as it pertains to multiple aspects of identity including race, gender, sexuality, disability, and age. We will examine how shows such as South Pacific, with its famous anti-racist anthem, and M. Butterfly, which explores the intersections of Orientalism, gender, and sexuality, temper their inclusive representations to appeal to a wide commercial audience. Broadway is a particularly fertile ground for exploring these issues because theatrical performances always call attention to the performative nature of subjectivity: you are what you do. As we shall see, though, theatrical performatives, instead of affirming the subjects they represent, threaten to turn those subjects into mere theater.

Our starting assumption is that many Broadway stake-holders genuinely desire broader representation in and for their work, but that the structure of the industry constrains how these shows challenge the status quo. By understanding those constraints, we will be able to critique and, perhaps, change what stories Broadway tells, who sees them, how they are marketed and, of course, “who tells your story.”

Stephanie Burt
Monday & Wednesday, 10:30-11:45am | Location: TBA
Course Website

We'll look at poems, poets, kinds of poems, and their histories by thinking about the people the poems project: how does a piece of writing in verse (or in lyrical prose) work to let us imagine a person behind it, either its author or its character? When does the poem, instead, imagine you? How do poems entice us to care about them, and about the people they project? We'll look at historically major authors, likely with a special focus on Donne, Pope, Hughes, Bishop and Moore, along with contemporary poets including Estes, Hayes and Youn.

Note: This course satisfies the English Concentration "Poets" requirement for the Class of 2022.

Instructor: Tracy K. Smith
Thursday, 3:00-5:00pm | Location: Sever 107
Course Website

African American poets have long embraced the private freedoms of the lyric poem—freedom to claim the authority of an uncontested first person “I”; freedom to wrangle language into new and startling forms; freedom to depart as needed from the strictures of linear reality. And yet, from its earliest iterations, African American poetry has also concerned itself with correcting and complicating the official narrative of Black life and Black subjectivity in America. This course will explore the means by which Black poets have innovated upon the lyric tradition to accommodate a sense of allegiance to a collective. In this tradition, the lyric poem has become a powerful tool with which to ponder the dynamics of self and other, intimate and political—and justice and injustice. Course readings will include work by seminal 20th Century American figures such as Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden and Lucille Clifton, as well as contemporary voices like Jericho Brown, Tyehimba Jess, Morgan Parker, Eve L. Ewing and others. We will also devote attention to lyric corollaries in film, music, visual art and performance. Students will be encouraged to respond to course themes and texts in both critical and creative form.

Note: This course satisfies the English Concentration "Poets" requirement for the Class of 2022.

Instructor: Ju Yon Kim
Tuesday & Thursday, 12-1:15pm | This course will be taught remotely, via Zoom, in Spring 2022. 
Course Website

This course will examine horror—defined expansively to include the uncanny, the abject, the monstrous, and the ghostly—in American literature, considering its formal and aesthetic implications and its relationship to major cultural and social issues. What are the methods and theories that critics have used to study horror in literature? How and to what effect have works of American literature used horror to reflect on contemporary social concerns or to depict historical events? We will explore a range of literary works from the nineteenth century to the present next to critical and theoretical studies of horror and the Gothic.

Note: This course satisfies the English Concentration "Migrations" requirement for the Class of 2022 and was formerly offered as English 60a. Migrations: American Horrors.

Instructor: Philip Fisher
Monday & Wednesday, 10:30-11:45am | Location: Sever 202
Course Website

A survey of the 20th-century novel, its forms, patterns of ideas, techniques, cultural context, rivalry with film and radio, short story, and fact.  Wharton, Age of Innocence; Cather, My Antonia; Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms and stories; Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury and stories;  Ellison, Invisible Man; Nabokov, Lolita; Robinson, Housekeeping; Salinger, Catcher in the Rye and stories; Ha Jin, Waiting; Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station. Stories by James, London, Anderson, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gaitskill, Wallace, Beattie, Lahiri, and Ford.

Instructor: Namwali Serpell
Monday & Wednesday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: Sever 203
Course Website

This course addresses two genres—black fiction and science fiction—at their point of intersection, which is sometimes called Afrofuturism. Our term “black fiction” includes texts that issue out of and speculate about the African-American experience. Our term “science fiction” comprises texts that speculate about alternative, cosmic, dystopian, utopian, and future worlds. Overlapping and mutually transforming concepts include: genetics, race, diaspora, miscegenation, double consciousness, technology, ecology, biology, language, history, futurity, space (inner and outer), and the alien. We will consider the short stories, novels, comics, film, television, and music of black science fiction.

Instructor: Sarah Dimick
Monday & Wednesday, 3:00-4:15pm | Location: Sever 106
Course Website

This course considers the relationships between systems of human injustice and environmental issues—including industrial disasters, ocean acidification, and resource extraction. We examine environmental justice writing and artwork with a transnational, interconnected approach. For example, we ask how Imbolo Mbue’s depiction of pipeline spills in the fictional town of Kosawa connects to Native American resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. We link a poem documenting silicosis in the lungs of West Virginian coal miners to a novel portraying the aftermath of the Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal. We compare a nonfiction account of Kenyan women resisting deforestation and an iPhone app reclaiming public access along the Malibu coast. We explore questions of voice, genre, and narrative, cataloguing the strategies writers and artists use to reach a global audience. 

Instructor: Elaine Scarry
Monday & Wednesday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: Sever 103

Consent will be studied in four domains: Part I-the relation of consent and the body in marriage, in medicine, and in state citizenship; Part II – the act of consent and dissent in war (beginning with the dissent of Achilles in the Iliad and including readings up to the present); Part III – freedom of movement, freedom of entry and exit in citizenship (including contexts where right of movement has been denied); Part IV – consent as the basis of cultural creation. The nature of individual and collective deliberation is at the center of the course throughout. Readings include: philosophic accounts of consent (Plato, Locke, Rousseau), case law (Plessy v. Ferguson, Pratt v. Davis, Schloendorff v. Society of New York Hospital), constitutional writings (Federalist Papers 4, 7, 8, 23, 25, 27-29, 41; Madison’s Record of Federal Assembly; Ratification Debates ), plays (Euripides’ Hecabe, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, five U.S. suffrage plays), poetry (Iliad), films (Philadelphia Story, It Happened One Night), novels (Tale of Two Cities), and historical narratives (Thucydides selections, Underground Railroad narratives).

Note: This course fulfills the "Ethics and Civics" General Education requirement

Instructors: Jay Harris, Jill Lepore, Deidre Lynch, Leah Whittington, Jesse McCarthy, Wai-yee Li
Tuesday, 10:30-11:45 am | Location: Boylston 110

2,500 years of essential works, taught by six professors. Humanities 10b is open only to students who completed Humanities 10a in Fall 2021. Humanities 10b will likely include works by Ellison, Woolf, Douglass, Wollstonecraft, Cao Xueqin, Shakespeare, Virgil, Sophocles and Homer, as well as the Arabian Nights, The Federalist Papers and the Book of Job. One 75-minute lecture plus a 75-minute discussion seminar led by the professors every week. Students continue to receive instruction in critical writing one hour a week, in writing labs and individual conferences. Students also have opportunities to participate online or in person, depending on public health conditions, in a range of cultural experiences, ranging from plays and musical events to museum and library collections.

Note: Humanities 10a and 10b will count as "Open Electives" for English concentrators. The course is open only to first-year students. Students who complete Humanities 10a meet the General Education distribution requirement for Arts & Humanities. Students who take both Humanities 10a and Humanities 10b fulfill the College Writing requirement. This is the only course outside of Expository Writing that satisfies the College Writing requirement. No auditors. The course may not be taken Pass/Fail.

Instructor: Marc Shell
Monday, 3:00-5:00pm | This course will be taught remotely, via Zoom, in Spring 2022.

Islands, both a part of and apart from the main, offer ready-made laboratories for linguistic, biological and political investigation. Islandness as such encourages national literature, philosophy, and vacation.  Our seminar, with its ecological and philosophical focus, centers on fictional an factual islands as well as Canadian ice floes, the always changing marine coastlines of  tidal islands, and Planet Earth itself,   Critical readings  include: Peter Sloterdijk’s Foams, Judith Shalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands, Sigmund Freud’s writings on his own world as “a little island of pain swimming in a sea of indifference,”  Immanuel Kant’s  “History of Lands and Islands,” and Shell’s Islandology. Literary and filmic works  include Shakespeare’s Hamlet,  John Donne’s argument that “No man is an island,” Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe,  More’s Utopia, Hae-Jun Lee’s “Castaway on the Moon,” Joseph Newman’s “This Island Earth,”  and island travel (and vacation) literature chosen by us as a group. Requirements: one short paper and one term paper.

Instructor: Glenda Carpio
Wednesday, 9:45-11:45am | Location: Barker 230

Close readings of major 20th-century writers in the context of cultural history. (I) From the Harlem Renaissance to the Federal Writers' Project: Alain Locke, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Jessie Fauset, George Schuyler, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright. (II) From World War II to the present: Ralph Ellison, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, Rita Dove, Colson Whitehead, Paul Beatty.

Note: This is the same course as English 195tw: 20th Century African American Literature (offered in Spring 2021) and should not be repeated for credit. 

Instructor: Jesse McCarthy
Monday, 9:45-11:45am | Location: Barker 269
Course Website
​​​​​​​Enrollment: Limited to 15 students

At first glance Henry James and James Baldwin may seem worlds apart. Yet these two enormously influential writers share much in common. Both are New Yorkers; both spent a good deal of their lives as expatriates; both are celebrated for their queerness, a feature of their style as much as their sexuality. Both were serious, moralizing, and passionate observers of the ‘American Scene’; both writers are deeply committed to investigating and exploring the privacy of consciousness and the currency of experience. Henry James was James Baldwin’s favorite writer. Colm Tóibín has called Baldwin, “the Henry James of Harlem.” What attracted Baldwin to James across their vast racial and class differences? What lessons about the art of fiction can we learn by reading each in the light of the other? Not only the Jamesian influence on Baldwin—but what Baldwin allows us to see might be missing or muted in James. We will think very closely about the subject that deeply occupied both of them: America. And what America means from perspectives acquired from outside of America, looking back in. We will also investigate the expression and communication of sexuality, gender, race, class, money, politics and taste alongside assorted criticism, reviews, and other essays of interest. 

Instructor: Deidre Lynch
Thursday, 3:00-5:00pm | Location: Barker 018 
Course Website
​​​​​​​Enrollment: Limited to 15 students

This course investigates literacy, literacy instruction, and literacy movements past and present, in theory and practice. Engaging with recent fictions and memoirs by authors such as Elena Ferrante and Ocean Vuong, with African-American slave narratives, laboring-class autobiographies, and other texts from the 19th century, and with materials from the history of alphabet books and children’s literature, “Literacy Stories” investigates the rich, ambivalent ways in which literature has depicted the literacy needed to consume it. Given under the auspices of the English Department and Harvard’s Mindich Program for Engaged Scholarship, “Literacy Stories” also involves collaborations with, and volunteer work for, various community organizations devoted to literacy advocacy and instruction.

This class will give us the opportunity to reflect—something we’ll do in part by learning from our community partners about the many ways of relating to texts that flourish beyond campus—on the contradictory ways in which we value reading. We’ll consider, for example, the friction between solitary and social reading: how the pleasures of this activity lie sometimes with how it separates us from others and sometimes with how it connects us. We will be thinking about literacy’s long-standing association with individual self-determination and thinking about how that association is put into question whenever people’s reading matter gets weaponized as an instrument of their domination. Literacy, the literary and theoretical texts on the syllabus will alike remind us, has a politics. Learning to be literate often involves experiences of unequal power relations and exclusion. Reading with (rather than “to” or “at”) others is an ethical challenge—one that humanities concentrators especially ought to explore.

The writing assignments you will do for “Literacy Stories” will join together academic analysis with personal narrative and social reflection. They will likely encompass regular short responses to the assigned texts, journal entries that reflect critically on what you have been learning from your volunteer work beyond Harvard, and interviews with literacy advocates and community organizers. The capstone project for the seminar will be a memoir—your own literacy story-- reflecting on your own memories of reading instruction and integrating those memories with your experiences in the community over the course of the semester.

Note: this course can be credited toward the Graduate School Education’s secondary field in Educational Studies.

Instructor: Homi Bhabha
Tuesday, 12:00-2:00pm | Location: Barker 211
Course Website
​​​​​​​Enrollment: Limited to 15 students. 

Why study literary theory? Is theory a conceptual framework or a tool-kit? Is theory a companion to literary study or is it crucial for literary interpretation? These are some of the questions I propose to address in this seminar which will address  literary and cultural problems that have been shaped by theoretical concerns and concepts. This course will not adopt a historical approach nor will it be a survey of “schools” of literary theory. The syllabus will focus on topics such as Power, Race, Identity, Sexuality, Environmentalism, Postcolonialism, Inequality, Poverty etc. etc.  and trace theoretical contributions that have been formative in shaping the diverse discourses around these issues. . Aesthetic, political and ethical approaches will be knotted together in our conversations. The seminar will be concerned with the relation between cultural form and cultural value. Literary texts will be used in conjunction with theoretical works.

Instructor: James Wood
Monday, 3:00-5:00pm | Location: Sever 203
Course Website
​​​​​​​Enrollment: Limited to 15 students.

A look at the complex ways in which writers represent their characters' thought in texts by Austen, Flaubert, James, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Giovanni Verga, and Woolf. More broadly, traces the development of stream-of-consciousness, from Austen's incipient mastery of free indirect style, through Flaubert's more sophisticated use of it, to Woolf's full-blown inner monologues, seeing this development as not merely a fact of English and American literature, but as a phenomenon of world literature and an element of our modernity.

Instructor: Derek Miller
Wednesday, 12:00-2:00pm | Location: Lamont Library 401
Course Website
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students

This course explores the history of dramatic writing and publishing in the US and Europe by studying every play ever written. Of course, we cannot actually study all those plays—that’s the point. When we learn cultural history, we necessarily encounter only a small fragment of all cultural artifacts, whether they be paintings, novels, or plays. What does it mean that we learn cultural history in this piecemeal fashion? That we study drama and yet know nothing, nothing of most dramatic writing? How should we, as people invested in the theater and its history, think about our unfathomable ignorance? And what is the relationship between those plays we do see, act in, or read, and the vastly larger number of plays we will never encounter?

This seminar puts theatrical texts in perspective by focusing on the relationship between the exemplary texts that we anthologize and the forgotten archive of, well, everything else. We will approach this problem by comparing selected exemplary texts to lists of plays and by situating both our examples and our lists within their theatrical contexts. We will worry particularly about the relationship between the examples and the lists, hypothesizing about what we can and cannot truly know about all the plays we have not read.

This course, in short, explores the limits of our knowledge of cultural history. We seek not to answer questions definitively so much as to understand better those things we do not and can not know about theater. We will learn, in other words, what we can never learn.

Instructor: Katie Daily
Thursday, 9:45-11:45am | Location: Barker 018
Course Website
​​​​​​​Enrollment: Limited to 15 students

The course aims to strengthen our understanding of the ways in which individuals creatively respond to immigration issues including diversity, equity, and justice in twenty-first century America. Through an intensive study of novels written by first- or second-generation American immigrant women, we will examine immigration’s evolution after the turn of the millennium and its relationships to power and inequity regarding questions of citizenship and belonging. Ericka Sánchez, Eristina Henríquez, Lisa Ko, Yaa Hyasi, Saher Alam, Shaila Abdullah, Chimamanda Ngozi, Adichie, Imbolo Mbue, Laila Lalami. 

Instructor: James Simpson
Monday, 3:00-5:00pm | Location: Barker 269
Course Website
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students

Fear of idolatry is a recurrent feature of Western culture. The Christian image threatens to short-circuit the flow of spirituality between humans and God, just as images of the ancient, pagan gods threaten dangerously to preserve the energies of those lascivious and vengeful deities. And images, whether secular or religious, are always potentially threatening to literate culture: they compete with words, and seem to possess a much more immediate power to mesmerize the imagination.  The Protestant Reformation in particular targeted images as the enemy to a true religion of the Word. Legislation in England determined the wholesale destruction of religious images (iconoclasm) between 1538 and 1644. On the other hand, many writers and artists, both secular and religious, look to the image for salvation of sorts. Guided by these perceptions, we will be looking to a range of pre- and post-Reformation texts and contexts. The course will be equally divided between late medieval and early modern texts. Students without Middle English should feel entirely at ease to take this course: all texts will be presented in reader-friendly editions. 

Instructor: Elaine Scarry
Thursday, 12:45-2:45 pm | Location: Barker 269 
Course Website
​​​​​​​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 essays on “luck” and “action”).

Instructor: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Monday, 12:00-2:00pm | Location: Hutchins Center 205 (104 Mount Auburn St) 
Course Website
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students

This course traces the history of the metaphor of a “New Negro” from its inception at the dawn of Jim Crow to the end of The New Negro Renaissance in the Great Depression.

Instructor: Elisa New
Fridays, 12-1:15 PM | Location: Meets Remotely
Course Website

Humanists of the 21st century are looking at a changed professional landscape.  Major shifts in higher education, and in the college and university job market for humanists, predate the COVID-19 pandemic, but the pandemic has brought these shifts into starker relief--even as it has revealed new opportunities for humanists in the fields of digital learning and educational media production, K-12 education, higher education administration, education policy, and more. 

Teaching the Humanities with New Media: A Poetry in America Practicum will enable students to experience some of these newer career opportunities by “embedding” as Research and Pedagogy Associates in Poetry in America: The City from Whitman to Hip Hop, a for-credit course being offered to high-school students--most of them from Title I and Title I-eligible schools--across the US and around the world.  This semester’s practicum will provide students an opportunity to gain exposure to, and to build skills in, the world of online education, broadly defined. Poetry of the City (POTC) is offered in partnership with the National Education Equity Lab and with Arizona State University.  The course will be offered under auspices of ASU’s online high school, ASU Prep Digital.

Students enrolled in the practicum will have official titled roles within the ASU course that may provide them useful credentials for the future. Visit poetryinamerica.org to learn more about Poetry in America and its programs. 

Note: Jointly offered with Harvard Kennedy School (as SUP-472 Education Equity Through A Solutions-Targeted Lens) and Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Instructor: Homi Bhabha & Mariano Siskind
Wednesday, 3:00-5:00pm | Location: Barker 269
Course Website
​​​​​​​Enrollment: Limited to 15 students

By focusing on literary narratives, cultural representations, and critical theories, this course explores ways in which issues related to migration create rich and complex interdisciplinary conversations. How do humanistic disciplines address these issues—human rights, cultural translation, global justice, security, citizenship, social discrimination, biopolitics—and what contributions do they make to the “home” disciplines of migration studies such as law, political science, and sociology? How do migration narratives compel us to revise our concepts of culture, polity, neighborliness, and community? We will explore diverse aspects of migration from existential, ethical, and philosophical perspectives while engaging with specific regional and political histories.

Instructor: Namwali Serpell
Tuesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Barker 269 
Course Website
​​​​​​​Enrollment: Limited to 15

This course is a survey of the work of the literary theorist Roland Barthes. We will read a selection of his eclectic, rangy, and influential writing, alongside responses to it by authors from Derrida to Sontag to Eugenides. We will use this corpus of writing to explore crucial currents in theory, criticism, and fiction from the sixties to today, including authorship, reader response, phenomenology, structuralism and its aftermaths, cultural studies, queer studies, media studies, affect theory, postcritique, and the theory novel.

Instructor: Nicholas Watson
Wednesday, 9:30-11:30am | Location: Barker 222

The first-year proseminar (taken in the spring semester of the first year) introduces students to the theories, methods, and history of English as a discipline, and contemporary debates in English studies. The readings feature classic texts in all fields, drawn from the General Exam list. This first-year proseminar helps students prepare for the General Exam (taken at the beginning of their second year); it gives them a broad knowledge for teaching and writing outside their specialty; and it builds an intellectual and cultural community among first-year students.

Note: This seminar is only for first year graduate students in the English Department.

Instructor: Kelly Rich
Wednesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Barker 269 

This second-year proseminar has a two-part focus:  it introduces students to the craft of scholarly publishing by helping them revise a research paper for publication in a peer-reviewed journal by the end of the course.  It thus gives students the tools to begin publishing early in their career.  It also introduces students to the growing array of alternative careers in the humanities by exposing them to the work of scholars who are leaders in fields such as editing, curating, and digital humanities.  

Note: Open to English graduate students only. Prerequisite: For G2+ students