Instructor: Nicholas Watson
Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:15pm | Location: TBA

Enrollment: 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), The Winter’s Tale (tragicomedy or romance), 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 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

Section 1 Instructor: Beth Blum
Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:15pm | Location: TBA
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students

Section 2 Instructor: Anna Wilson
Tuesday & Thursday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: TBA
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 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: Glenda Carpio and Tommie Shelby
Monday, 3:00-5:00 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 approach to this wide-ranging and canonical American author, contextualizing him within the broader tradition of black letters. Readings include but are not limited to Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son, Black Boy, American Hunger, 12 Million Black Voices, The Outsider, Black Power, The Color Curtain, White Man Listen!, and Eight Men. The course also explores major influences in Wright's development including the work of Marx, Sartre, and Freud.

This course satisfies the English Concentration "Diversity in Literature" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.

This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

Instructor: Jesse McCarthy
Monday & Wednesday, 10:30-11:45 am | Location: TBA

What does freedom have to do with our ability to read and write? How have writers addressed the conflicting and contradictory concept of race by writing about it? This course will investigate the history and practice of writing about the vexed relationship between race and freedom, the role of writing in political struggles for civil rights and the abolition of slavery, and the quest for a meaningful life and artistic freedom under conditions that deny that opportunity. We will read widely, primarily—though not exclusively—texts from (and about) the African diaspora from the 16th century to the present. Authors will include Ottabah Cugoano, Phillis Wheatley, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Sylvia Wynter, C.L.R. James, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Hilton Als and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah. The final assignment will involve using the resources of the course to produce an original essay on a topic of your choice related to our themes.

This course satisfies the English Concentration "Diversity in Literature" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.

Instructor: Daniel Donoghue
Monday & Wednesday, 10:30-11:45 am | Location: TBA

Building on the basic grammar and translation skills learned in English 102, this course introduces students to Old English literature in its most immediate context: the manuscripts that preserve their earliest copies. The weekly task of translation will be supplemented by consistent attention to the manuscript contexts of Old English literature. The texts will include selections from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the OE Genesis with its illustrations, Exeter Book Riddles, Beowulf, and others. The instruction will guide students through basic principles of manuscript study. As a special event we will invite a professional calligrapher to instruct students—equipped with a goose quill!—on the traditional skill of calligraphy. At the end of the term, with the help of personal coaching, each student will edit and translate manuscript folios in a collaborative edition of an Old English text.

Recommended Preparation: English 102.

Students who complete both English 102 and 103 with honors grades will fulfill the College language requirement and the English Department’s Foreign Literature requirement.

Instructor: Anna Wilson
Tuesday & Thursday, 10:30-11:45 am | Location: TBA

Fanfiction is a surprisingly powerful tool for examining medieval literature. It sheds light on the dynamics of rereading and transformation that characterizes medieval literary culture, which in turn deepen our own understanding of the nature of creativity. In this class we will read some twentieth- and twenty-first century retellings of medieval stories, including fanfiction, alongside medieval literary texts that rewrite, reimagine, or let their authors star in pre-existing stories. This medieval fanfiction will include different takes on the medieval superhero Sir Gawain (including the 2020 movie starring Dev Patel), unauthorized additions to The Canterbury Tales, and medieval Christian devotional manuals which encourage their readership to participate in imaginative exercises where they imagine themselves as participating in events in the life of Jesus Christ. Along the way we will learn what medieval readers and writers thought of questions like, what is an author? What is literature? What is a character? And what happens in our brains when we read? 

This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students. 

Instructor: Alan Niles
Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:15pm | Location: TBA

This course is an introduction to the different voices, cultures, and traditions that made the first 1000 years of English literature, from Beowulf to Aphra Behn. We will study major and influential writings alongside lesser-known interlocutors—works by Marie de France, Geoffrey Chaucer, Margery Kempe, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Mary Sidney, John Milton, Alexander Pope, and more. We will engage with the (often contested) social, political, and religious contexts that gave rise to creative work. We will pay particular attention to the historical transformations of romance, epic, drama, fable, and lyric, and the ways these forms were embedded in the social worlds of their time.

This course satisfies the English Concentration "Arrivals" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.

This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

Instructor: Stephen Greenblatt
Tuesday & Thursday, 1:30-2:45 pm | Location: TBA

An exploration of Shakespeare at work:  what plot devices was he particularly drawn to, how did he develop characters, how did he characteristically construct scenes, how did he handle dialogue. The course will also -- with the aid of supplementary secondary and critical readings -- examine some of the conditions within which he worked: the structure and economics of his theater, censorship, the resources of his language, training in rhetoric, the assumptions of his audience, the nature of his competition.  Students will try their own hand at “Shakespearean playwriting,” drafting scenes, on the basis of surviving primary materials, from two lost plays, the one a tragedy of political assassination, the other a romantic tragicomedy of love, betrayal, and madness.  Written assignments will include two papers, the two playwriting assignments, and the compiling of a list of Shakespeare’s favorite tricks-of-the-trade.

This course satisfies the English Concentration "Shakespeare" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.

This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

Instructor: Gordon Teskey
Monday & Wednesday, 1:30-2:45 pm | Location: TBA

This course focuses on Milton’s most famous work, Paradise Lost, the greatest long poem in English and the only successful classical epic in the modern world. Milton went totally blind in his forties and composed Paradise Lost by reciting verses to anyone available to take them down, like the blind prophets and poets of legend. Yet the moral and political questions he raised—what is the human? what is gender? what is the political? what is religion? what is dissent? what is legitmacy? what is revolt?—are surprisingly enduring and modern. His own solutions to these questions may not be ours, but his abilility to provoke thought on them speaks to our time. We will consider how Milton generates the sublime and how he builds great scenes and characters, especially his most famous one, Satan.

This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

Instructor: Peter Sacks
Wednesday, 3:00-5:00pm | Location: TBA

There are almost as many paths through Twentieth Century Poetry as there are individual poems.  Each iteration of this course will have different – and evolving – emphases.  For the Spring of 2023 we shall focus on the Century’s relation between poetry and history.  Poets include W.B.Yeats, T.S.Eliot, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill.  Brief attention will also be devoted to poetry in translation by Mandelstam, Celan, Lorca, Cavafy, Anna Swir, Zbigniew Herbert, and others.

This course satisfies the English Concentration "Poets" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.

This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

Instructor: Philip Fisher
Monday & Wednesday, 10:30-11:45am | Location: TBA

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: Matthew Ocheltree
Tuesday & Thursday, 1:30-2:45pm | Location: TBA

This course satisfies the “1700-1900 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

Instructor: Vidyan Ravinthiran
Monday & Wednesday, 10:30-11:45 am | Location: TBA

Although this course touches on blockbuster games—“ludo-narrative dissonance” and India’s role in Uncharted: The Lost Legacy; racism, satire, and the white-saviour narrative in the Far Cry franchise; Ayn Rand, US history and the illusion of gamer choice in Bioshock—it’s primarily concerned with indie titles which explore alternative forms of storytelling. More specifically, it’s about games pilloried—rather as free verse poetry is bashed as “just chopped up prose”—as mere “walking simulators”, in which there’s more exploration than action, more narrative than gameplay. These qualities have migrated into bigger titles like Death Stranding, as developers prioritize discovery over destruction, asking us to think differently about our relationship to game environments. We’ll examine the gendered deconstruction of horror-codes in Gone Home, and how the house-exploration theme plays out differently in What Remains of Edith Finch?; consider outsiderhood and English village life in Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture; the connection between pastoral and paranoia in Firewatch; and exploded conventions in The Stanley Parable. 

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

The estranged, didactic, intellectual theatre of Brecht, and the ritualistic, emergency theatre of Artaud serve as reference points for a range of American, English, and Continental plays. The unique part played by "consent" in theatrical experience. Emphasis on the structural features of drama: establishing or violating the boundary between audience and stage; merging or separating actor and character; expanding or destroying language. Readings include Brecht, O'Neill, Artaud, Genet, Pirandello, and such earlier authors as Euripides and Shelley.

Instructor: Maria Dikcis
Tuesday & Thursday, 10:30-11:45 am | Location: TBA

Does it sometimes feel like Instagram ads are listening a little too closely to your conversations? Have you ever wondered if certain corporations might own images of your face? Today, fears abound that algorithms are not only populating our lives with annoying targeted advertisements but might also be creating the most unequal societies that have ever existed. In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will explore key methodological overlaps and differences between humanistic and scientific approaches to the phenomenon known as Big Data, or enormously large data sets that are analyzed by computer software to reveal patterns associated with human behavior and communications. In particular, we will focus our attention on the dark side of Big Data, which is increasingly embedded with harmful biases against women, people of color, immigrants, and low-socioeconomic status communities. Our inquires will thus concern a wide array of issues that stem from the misapplication of Big Data, such as data discrimination, biased artificial intelligence, search engines that reinforce racism, predictive policing, and surveillance capitalism, as well as how these issues intersect with race, class, gender, and citizenship. We will ground these discussions about contemporary theories of Big Data in engagements with a number of literary texts, films, and new media artworks. These cultural case studies range from a poetry collection exploring anti-Blackness and the carceral state, a documentary on social media data scandals, a glitch feminism manifesto, a memoir about working at an Amazon.com fulfillment center, queer video games, and robot love poems.​​​​​​​

Instructor: John Stauffer
Monday & Wednesday, 1:30-2:45 pm | Location: TBA

Most of us were taught that the Civil War between the Confederacy and the Union was fought on battlefields chiefly in the American South between the years of 1861-1865. In this narrative, the North won and the South lost. But what if the issues that resulted in such devastating bloodshed were never resolved? What if the war never ended? This course demonstrates the ways in which the United States is still fighting the Civil War, arguably THE defining event in U.S. history. In each class, we connect current events to readings and themes in the course, highlighting how and why the war is still being fought. From Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in 1831 to the recent riot (or battle) in Charlottesville, we trace how and why the South was in certain respects the victor, even though the Confederacy was destroyed and the Constitution amended. We explore the different kinds of war—ideological, political, cultural, military, and para-military—that placed the unfreedom of blacks—as slaves, serfs, and prisoners—at the center of larger conflicts over federal versus state and local rule, welfare, globalization, and free trade. We analyze the Civil War in literature, art, politics, photography, prints, film, music, poetry, speeches, and history, while also discovering how these cultural forms worked to shape our memory of the event itself. By the end of the course, we will be able to show how and why contemporary U.S. debates are rooted in this defining narrative, and we will better understand the dilemmas the nation faces today.

This course satisfies the “1700-1900 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

Instructors: Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Menand, Jesse McCarthy, Beth Blum, Kathleen Coleman, Ambrogio Pistoja
Tuesday, 10:30-11:45 am | Location: TBA

2,500 years of essential works, taught by six professors. Humanities 10b will likely include works by Homer, Sappho, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Boccaccio, Montaigne, Austen, Du Bois and Joyce, along with the Book of Genesis. One 75-minute lecture plus a 75-minute discussion seminar led by the professors every week. Students will receive instruction in critical writing one hour a week, in writing labs and individual conferences. Students also have opportunities to participate 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: Ju Yon Kim
Tuesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: TBA
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students

This seminar will explore Asian American theater and performance. We will examine how Asian American theater and performance artists have responded to popular images of Asian immigrants and cultures; how Asian American theater companies have cultivated and expanded our understanding of American theater and Asian American identity; and how artists and productions have experimented with conceptions of racial and gender performance. In addition to reading, viewing, and listening to a range of performances, students will participate in workshops led by artists and develop their own final performances.

This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

This course satisfies the English Concentration "Diversity in Literature" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.

Instructor: Derek Miller
Tuesday, 9:45-11:45am
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students.

This course examines recent scripted theater by American playwrights. Readings focus on work by historically underrepresented writers, including the wave of award-winning plays by Black writers such as Jackie Sibblies Drury, Michael R. Jackson, Aleshea Harris, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Jeremy O. Harris, and others. We will consider the shape of the American theater, its response and resistance to contemporary social and political movements, and the pandemic's effects on the present and future of American theater.

This course satisfies the English Concentration "Diversity in Literature" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.

Instructor: Vidyan Ravinthiran
Wednesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: TBA
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 her innovations in all these genres. We will look at her writing in multiple genres alongside the mid-century shift from ‘closed’ to ‘open’ verse forms, and relate stylistic issues to the intellectual and social changes, and political and historical developments of the period. Bishop’s critique of received ideas about nationality, race, power, gender, sexual orientation, and the overlap between culture and nature, is connected with her status as a cosmopolitan poet with links to Canada, the U.S. and Brazil.  ‘Others’ refers both to how her writing comes to terms with the (sociopolitical) reality of other people, and to the comparisons we’ll draw between her writing and that of other poets.   

This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

This course satisfies the English Concentration "Diversity in Literature" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.

Instructor: David Levine
Wednesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: TBA
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students

Briefly America’s most terrifying movie, now an inexhaustible source of camp, reference, and technique, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist is a rich allegory of postwar America. But its very deficiencies, blind spots, and occlusions also make a powerful lens onto the present day. This advanced workshop in devising, adaptation, and critical intervention will perform (literally) an examination of the significance, meaning, and unholy afterlife of The Exorcist, created over the semester using historical research, conversations, attempts at re- staging, religious rites, death-metal growls, and head turns of 180 degrees or more.

This course satisfies the English Concentration "Diversity in Literature" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.

Instructor: James Wood
Monday, 12:00-2:00pm | Location: TBA
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.

This course satisfies the “1700-1900 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.​​​​​​​

Instructor: Pamela Klassen
Tuesday, 12:00-2:00pm | Location: TBA
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students

This class will focus on how telling stories on paper, online, and on the land continue to make and remake North America and Turtle Island. Treaties, deeds of property, maps that survey a domain to facilitate resource extraction, sacred scriptures, missionary journalism, transcripts of Royal Commissions, and petitions from representatives of Indigenous nations are all textual modes that claim land, with greater or lesser force. Today, many digital humanities projects attempt to re-mediate these texts to forward a critical consciousness of the ongoing effects and assumptions of settler colonial stories of land (see the websites of the Yellowhead Institute at https://yellowheadinstitute.org/ or the Land Grab Universities project at https://www.landgrabu.org/ ). The readings will focus on Indigenous/settler relations in Canada and the United States, with attention to book history, the materiality of texts, and diverse forms of mediation (e.g. newspapers, statues, websites, TikTok). We will also take field trips to archives and sites in the Cambridge area that help us to see and experience the interaction of texts, land, and memory in the making of colonial nations. Assignments will include a primary source reflection, essay drafts, presentations, and a final essay or digital story.

This course satisfies the English Concentration "Diversity in Literature" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.

This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

Instructor: Louis Menand
Wednesday, 9:45-11:45am | Location: TBA
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students

How has the American judicial system dealt with racial discrimination, racial segregation, racial exclusion, and systemic or institutional racism? Has the design of the American legal system made it easier or harder to remedy cases of racial inequality and injustice? What should we expect from the courts in the future?

We study cases involving Americans of African and of Asian ancestry, beginning with Dred Scott and ending with the Harvard College admissions case. Visitors include Drew Faust, Mae Ngai, Richard Pildes, and William Lee and Felicia Ellsworth, the trial lawyers in the Harvard College case.

The primary readings are legal documents: the Constitution, judicial opinions, and the statutes judges interpret. We’ll analyze the opinions in order to understand the legal logic that led to their outcomes. We will see, by doing this, how courts are constrained by the system that was designed by the Constitution’s framers and by the traditions of the common law. We will also consider the historical context in which these cases were decided. Two papers and class participation required.

This course satisfies the English Concentration "Diversity in Literature" requirement for students on the “Common Ground” curriculum.

This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

Instructor: Alan Niles
Wednesday, 9:45-11:45am | Location: TBA
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students

Henry VIII, “Bloody” Mary, Queen Elizabeth; Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne. In a little over a century, the Tudor dynasty reshaped English literature, culture, and politics. The Tudors have continued to shape popular imaginations of the English past ever since, being variously conscripted for the ideological work of Britain’s expanding empire, hailed as a privileged origin point for modernity, and transformed into popular novels, films, and TV series. This course explores the history and culture of the Tudor period and its enduring hold on our cultural imagination. Through readings, discussions, and class activities, we will explore such topics as narratives of the Protestant Reformation, the history of sexuality and queer erasure, race and colonialism in the early modern world, and literary transformations including the emergence of the literary market and the public stage. Readings will include poems, plays, and experimental prose writings by Thomas More, John Bale, Anne Askew, Thomas Wyatt, Anne Lok, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and John Donne, as well as more recent films, novels, and TV shows including Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love, and Toby Marlowe and Lucy Moss’s musical Six.

This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

Instructor: Peter Sacks
Wednesday, 12:00-2:00pm | Location: TBA
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students

An undergraduate seminar examining the poetry of William Butler Yeats.

This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.

Instructor: Daniel Donoghue
Wednesday, 12:00-2:00pm | Location: TBA
​​​​​​​Enrollment: Limited to 15 students

This course investigates linguistic, individual, and national identities in early Middle English literature, and as such the course itself has multiple identities. On a basic level it is an introduction to the English vernacular of 1100 to 1300, a period of great flux without a “standard” such as the one that existed in late Old English (West Saxon) and the other that emerged at the end of the fourteenth century (London). Not only are there significant differences in dialect, but even within similar dialects orthographic conventions could vary from one scribe to the next. Because nearly every text has its linguistic idiosyncrasies, the end of many of our meetings will analyze the language of the text set for discussion the next week in order to make the week’s reading a little easier. The earlier and more challenging texts have facing-page translations. 

This is also a period of great experimentation in genres, with some innovations that took hold and others that fizzled out, such as the verse chronicle of Lawman. Dame Sirith is the only surviving fabliau in English until Chaucer resurrected the genre. Is there anything later quite like The Owl and the Nightingale? Does Ormulum deserve the obscurity it has slipped into? Some genres like saints’ lives were inherited from Old English and with sources in Latin. Others like family romances arose in response to changing social conditions unique to the period. The “false starts” are often as interesting as the genres that continued.

Instructor: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
TBA| Location: TBA
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. The period of Reconstruction (1865-1877), following the American Civil War, ushered in a “Second Founding” of the nation through the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, establishing birthright citizenship, due process and equal protection of the laws, and the right to vote for black male citizens. While revolutionary, the period of Reconstruction was also short-lived, and the long, violent roll-back against it, curiously known as the “Redemption,” witnessed the curtailing of these rights along with the rise and institutionalization of Jim Crow segregation in what one newspaper editor coined the “New South.”  A key aspect of Redemption was a propaganda war designed to debase the image of African Americans, and thereby justify the deprivation of their rights. Resisting it, African Americans, starting in the mid-1890s, employed the concept of a “New Negro” to combat racist images of an “Old Negro” fabricated by apologists for Jim Crow. The trope of a New Negro underwent several revisions between the 1890’s and 1920’s, when—in the midst of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North—the Harvard-trained philosopher, Alain Locke, revised and appropriated the term  to describe a remarkable flowering of art and literature that he named “The New Negro Renaissance,” and which later would be labeled “The Harlem Renaissance.”

Instructor: Stephanie Burt
Monday, 12:00-2:00pm| Location: TBA
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students

Queer and trans literary writing now, its parallels and its precursors, from late medieval to the present day, along with useful ideas about it. Some history, some theory, but mostly queer and trans and queer-adjacent literature. Marlowe, Rochester, K. Phillips, Wilde, Rich, Baldwin; some primary texts determined by *your interests,* including less-often-studied genres and media such as graphic novels and YA.

Instructor: Homi Bhabha & Mariano Siskind
Wednesday, 3:00-5:00pm | Location: TBA
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: Elaine Scarry
Thursday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: TBA
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 arguments against beauty; and its stability across four objects (gods, gardens, persons, and poems).

Instructor: Derek Miller
TBA | Location: TBA
Conference seminar course (open to both undergraduates and graduates)

This course introduces practical skills in programming for the Digital Humanities (DH) while also investigating the theories and debates that continue to define that field. We will focus primarily on DH’s applications to research questions in the humanities rather than on any pedagogical or archival uses. The course is designed with a firm belief not in DH’s righteousness—indeed, we will devote considerable time to critiques of the field—but rather in the necessity of grappling with its ideas and practices in an informed manner. To that end, our exploration of DH methods will involve considerable work in computer programming (though you need have no prior knowledge of those skills). Our practical work with coding and with pre-fabricated digital tools will give us the tools to understand what happens to our thinking when we think about the humanities with computers.

Instructor: Nicholas Watson
Wednesday, 9:00-11:45am | Location: TBA

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: John Stauffer
TBA | Location: TBA

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