English Graduate Current Courses

2025 - 2026 Graduate Courses

All English graduate courses are held on the Rose Hill campus unless otherwise specified. Undergraduate English Majors in their senior year are welcome to request admission to the 5000-level graduate courses listed below.

If you’d like to take one of these courses, please include the specific course(s) in which you are interested and email [email protected].

Spring 2026

ENGL 5135: Paleography (Fridays, 2:30 PM - 5:00 PM)
Thomas O'Donnell
This course offers an in-depth introduction to the history of handwriting and book production (“paleography” and “codicology”) in western and central Europe during the years 400 to 1500—a critical period for the creation of the book as we know it. Students will receive training in the handling and interpretation of rare materials from across the whole medieval period. They will learn how to read and transcribe ancient and medieval writing (a set of skills that will transfer to later periods of handwriting); how to determine the place and date of production of a book based on its script, material, or decoration; and how to interpret the manuscript book as a primary source for the study of society, politics, and culture. Trips to special collections and visits from period experts from a range of disciplines are a feature of the course. Specialists of any historical period are welcome.
CRN 52353
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Fulfills H1

ENGL 5266: Writing Modern Life: The City (Thursdays, 2:30 PM - 5:00 PM)
Lawrence Kramer
The city in literary tradition originates as an object of satire or a utopian fiction, but beginning in the nineteenth century it evolves into the essential scene of modern life for both good and ill. This course will examine the modern city in literature, especially Paris, London, and New York, plus James Joyce’s Dublin. After an introductory look at premodern instances, the course will examine the making and marring of urban modernity in both poetry and fiction, with asides in music and film. Writers to be read may include William Wordsworth, Charles Baudelaire, Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, James Weldon Johnson, T. S. Eliot, Federico Garcia Lorca, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Rhys, among others, together with contemporaneous theorists of modern urban life: Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebre, and Lewis Mumford.
CRN PENDING
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Fulfills H3

ENGL 5543: New Theories in Black Studies (Tuesdays, 5:30 PM - 8:00 PM)
Sasha Panaram
The field of Black Literary and Cultural Studies is flourishing. The past few years have witnessed the production of innovative texts that challenge traditional forms of scholarship and offer new models for writing. In this course, graduate students will read an array of recently published scholarship to determine what new methodologies, genealogies, theoretical, and critical concerns are being raised. Each new monograph that we read will be paired with a foundational field-shaping article in Black Studies and students will be asked to articulate the relationship between the two. Our weekly readings will be supplemented with guest lectures from several of the authors featured on the syllabus as well as a visit to the Schomburg Center. Possible authors include: Jennifer C. Nash, Imani Owens, Julius Fleming, I. Augustus Durham, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Marina Magloire, and Tina Post, among others.
CRN 52354
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Fulfills DI

ENGL 5600: Special Topics in Rhetorical Theory & Criticism: Rhetoric and Racial Capitalism (Mondays, 5:30 PM - 8:00 PM)
Catherine Chaput
As part of the Graduate Certificate in Rhetoric & Writing, this course uses a rhetorical lens to explore the history of race, gender, sexuality, and other identity categories as they have been invented alongside capitalism. The course is divided into three units. The first unit focuses on a structural critique. We will position the domestication of women, the colonization of land, resources, and people, as well as the trans-Atlantic slave trade as both foundational to capitalism and part of its on-going appropriation of wealth. The second unit investigates the role of the human subject in these processes. Reading theorists with first-hand experiences in the formation of anti-capitalist and/or decolonial states, we will focus on human subject formation and human praxis as sites of oppression as well as possibility. The third unit uses these two forms of critique—the structural and the personal—as foundational to how activist-scholars work to produce more socially just modes of being in the world. It works from the notion of the human subject as both an aesthetic and rhetorical invention.
CRN 52355
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Fulfills DI, ENRW

ENGL 5746: Instances of Autofiction: Postmodernist Literature in Translation (Thursdays, 5:30 PM - 8:00 PM)
Daniel Contreras
This course will explore the postmodern literary form of autofiction: the curious case of writers writing about "themselves" in a fictional mode. This oxymoronic practice has been both hugely influential and controversial. We will read Nobel prize winners Anne Ernoux and Patrick Modriano, along with literary favorites like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Cesar Aira, Alejandro Zambra, and Sheila Heti. These are all contemporary working writers but when we look into the recent literary past, we find writers such as Norman Mailer, Sylvia Plath, Jorge Luis Borges, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Hervè Guibert, and Marguerite Duras who all explored what happens when the borders between self and fiction are dissolved. Other writers to consider include: Junot Díaz, Bret Easton Ellis, Rachel Cusk, Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, Ocean Vuong. We will ask questions about this slippery form: is it literary narcissism? How is it "creative" and what does it do to the definition of creativity itself? In other words, this is a course about the aesthetics of autofiction.
CRN 52356
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Fulfills H3, DI

ENGL 5849: 19th Century American Literature (Thursdays, 11:30 AM - 2:00 PM)
Glenn Hendler
An introduction to recent Americanist literary scholarship, comparing and contrasting methodologies that have been brought to bear on three or four important works of U.S. literature published before 1900. Students who register for this class will get some say in which three or four works we will focus on intently.
CRN 52357
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Fulfills H2

ENGL 5998: MA Capstone (Tutorial) TBA
Required course for MA students who wish to fulfill the Capstone assignment. Please contact the DGS if you are unsure about which semester would be best for your Capstone completion.
CRN 45053
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ENGL 5999: THEORY AND PRACTICE OF TEACHING WRITING (Wednesdays, 5:30-8:00 PM)
Crystal Colombini
This course builds on the foundation developed in ENGL 5999 by delving into research-supported best practices for preparing students for diverse writing contexts. Readings and discussions will highlight writing and teaching strategies that support students' critical thinking and writing skills, covering topics related to primary and secondary research, information literacy, discourse and disciplinary communities, rhetorical and audience analysis, multimodal composition, effective response and assessment strategies, cognitive scaffolding and assignment design, and more.
CRN 44282
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ENGL 8935: Dissertation Seminar (Thursdays, 5:30-8:00 PM)
Andrew Albin
This 0-credit seminar is designed as a resource for all doctoral students who have passed the comprehensive exam. Students working on the dissertation proposal are encouraged to take this class. During each meeting students will present and respond to work in progress. Across the semester, the seminar will treat challenges of bibliographic research and strategies of effective writing specific to large projects.
CRN 44283
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Required for all PhD students preparing the dissertation prospectus.

Fall 2025

ENGL 5029: The Invention of Nature (Fridays, 11:30 - 2:00 PM, at Lincoln Center)
Lawrence Kramer
The idea of nature as the autonomous realm of nonhuman life is essentially literary in origin, dating from the early modern era and extending to the present. Nature has come into being in writing, and its elements--animal, vegetable, and mineral--have been brought together under a changing series of rubrics including landscape, wilderness, environment, world, and ecosystem. This course will trace the writing of nature from the early-modern representations of Shakespeare and Montaigne through the pre- and post-Darwinian writings of the nineteenth century (Wordsworth, Poe, Thoreau, and Darwin himself) to modern representations of nature in relation to civilization, race, migration, and ecological crisis (D. H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Bishop, Annie Dillard, Anne Carson). Topics include the aesthetics of nature, the boundaries between the human and nonhuman worlds, and the relationship between the human and the animal.
CRN 53469
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Fulfills H2, H3

ENGL 5189: Birdsong (Wednesdays 11:30 - 2:00 PM at Lincoln Center)
Sarah Zimmerman
The close association of poetry and birdsong is ancient and global. We explore that endlessly renewable connection with a special emphasis on Romantic-era poetry. Writers have long listened closely to birds and been inspired by their singing to experiment with literary innovation. Yet the question of how we listen to birds takes on new urgency in our own era of climate crisis, marked by declining bird populations and extinction. Our wide range of readings features birds alternately sounding warnings as canaries in the coal mine and figuring hope as “the thing with feathers.” We take an interdisciplinary approach to the topic of birds inspired by environmental and sound studies in reading literature and non-fiction prose, including essays and memoirs. We put our learning into practice by birdwatching in local parks, taking advantage of NYC’s location on the Atlantic flyway. Readings include works by Phillis Wheatley Peters, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and John Clare.
CRN 53470
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Fulfills H2

ENGL 5196: Master Class: Dragons, Daggers, and Dukes: Writing Fantasy/Sci-Fi, Romance/Mystery (Wednesdays 5:30 - 8:00 PM, at Lincoln Center)
Mary Bly
Genre fiction is, by definition, writing that bows to limitation: Conventions shape the parameters of a story. Yet, in excellent genre fiction, the imaginary world is doubly creative despite constraints or conventions. In this class, we’ll tackle bestsellers—pop fiction that engages and enthralls readers. We will study and experiment before setting into a final manuscript in the genre of your choice.
CRN 53471
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Fulfills CVWG

ENGL 5223: Embodied Research in Medieval Drama (Mondays 2:30 - 5:00 PM)
Andrew Albin
What did it feel like to hammer nails into Jesus’s hands or to intone judgements at Doomsday or to dance with the Deadly Sins on an open-air stage in the late Middle Ages? How far can we go in reconstructing, practicing, and sharing medieval performance styles today? What kind of knowledge might the evidence of our own bodies afford us in support of our study of the medieval past? In this course, we will tug at this knot of questions through careful reading, writing, discussion, and experimentation across an uncommon collection of sources, including medieval English playtexts and documents; scholarship on medieval drama and its reenactment; theoretical texts in performance studies, theater-making, and embodied technique; and the witness of our own embodied and reflective experience. Relevant research areas include medieval drama, history of the body, history of experience, history of spirituality, critical temporality studies, non-discursive epistemology, affect studies. Primary source readings will include much of the corpus of surviving Middle English drama supplemented by the Records of Early English Drama project; further readings include Sharon Aronson-Lehavi, Augusto Boal, Rob Boddice, Jerzy Grotowski, Andre Lepecki, Lauren Mancia, Mary Overlie, Rebecca Schneider, Matthew Sergi, Mark Smith, Ben Spatz, and others. Course assignments will center close reading, scholarly research, and academic writing, with options for digital humanities and performance-driven research, undertaken independently or collaboratively. Students may also opt into a parallel laboratory in Mary Overlie’s Six Viewpoints and/or a public performance of medieval drama at the Cloisters Museum in Spring 2026. While helpful, no prior knowledge of Middle English or Latin is expected or required.
CRN 53721
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Fulfills H1

ENGL 5252: Exhibiting Latinidad: Curation/Display/Intervention (Fridays, 2:30 - 5:00 PM, at Lincoln Center)
Robb Hernández
Museums have played critical roles in defining Latinidad for mass publics in the U.S. and abroad. In particular, curators and their exhibits can assume great power over our understandings of authenticity, cultural authority, and the historical “truth” about Latinx cultures. By retracing exhibition histories from classic shows like Cuba-USA and the Decade Show to the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time LA/LA initiative, we will confront the different material, textual, and visual dilemmas provoked by museums. We will also ponder alternative exhibition practices for Latinidad’s representation and remembrance in the future.
CRN 53473
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Fulfills H3, DI

ENGL 5544: Eighteenth-Century Black Thought (Thursdays, 2:30 - 5:00 PM)
Julie Kim
This course will examine Black writing and art in the eighteenth century, which was defined both by the rise of Atlantic slavery and by resistance to it. How did enslaved individuals describe their experiences of bondage and captivity? How did they respond to rhetorics of racial difference and dehumanization? What alternatives to enslavement, including possibilities of escape, fugitivity, and freedom, did they imagine, and what forms did they deploy to express these alternatives? We will consider these questions to understand the richness and complexity of eighteenth-century Black artistic practices, as well as to theorize these practices as ways of thinking through the fundamental dilemma of living in circumstances of unfreedom. In addition to looking at writings by such authors as Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, and Mary Prince, we will look at works of visual art by Prince Demah, Guillaume Lethière, Moses Williams, Joshua Johnson, John Tyley, Sarah Mapps Douglass, and David Drake. We will also consider other art forms, including music and dance, and draw comparisons to present-day works of Black writing and art.
CRN 54688
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Fulfills H2, DI

ENGL 5651: Writing Center Theory and Praxis (RW) (Tuesdays 5:30 - 8:00 PM)
Elisabeth Buck
This course will explore what it means to be a writing center practitioner through empirical, practical, and theoretical experiences. Working one-on-one with another student—while ostensibly a straightforward process—can instead reveal the many complexities of language, education, and culture. As such, the Writing Center is the ideal site through which to explore nuances of speech, conversational dynamics, ways to dismantle hegemonic language practices, and, critically, strategies for communicating knowledge. No prior writing center experience is required for this class, but this course will be useful to anyone who has an interest in teaching and/or tutoring writing.
CRN 53474
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Fulfills Rhetoric & Writing Adv Cert

ENGL 5001: Research Methods (Tuesdays, 2:30 - 5:00 PM)
Julie Kim
An introduction to English studies at the graduate level, emphasizing bibliography, scholarly writing, and critical intervention. Although the emphasis of the course will vary according to the aims of the instructor, areas covered may also include book history, textual editing, historical research, and other issues of professional concern to graduate students.
CRN 13250
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Required for all incoming PhD students.

ENGL 5115: Internship Seminar (Tutorial) TBA
This seminar is open to graduate students pursuing internships in publishing, museum management, or arts administration during the spring 2021 semester. Please contact the Director of Graduate Studies to make sure that your internship qualifies for course credit.
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ENGL 5998 Master’s Capstone (Tuesdays, 12:00 PM – 2:30 PM)
Leonard Cassuto
Seminar for MA students who wish to fulfill the Capstone requirement (note: the Capstone requirement may also be fulfilled, as an independent study, during the spring or summer semesters. Please contact the DGS if you are unsure about which semester would be best for your Capstone completion.
CRN 45455
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ENGL 6004: Colloquium: Pedagogy Theory Practicum (Thursdays, 11:30 AM - 2:00 PM)
Catherine Chaput
This course introduces students to central histories, issues, and debates in writing and rhetorical studies. By highlighting key theoretical and terminological developments, this course lays the way for informed self-reflective practice based in awareness of the most current scholarly work in rhetoric and composition, thereby helping participants start to define their own identities as teachers of first-year composition as well as literature and other courses.
CRN 13269
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ENGL 8935: Dissertation Seminar (Mondays, 5:30 - 8:00 PM)
Maria Farland
This 0-credit seminar is designed as a resource for all doctoral students who have passed the comprehensive exam. Students working on the dissertation proposal are encouraged to take this class. During each meeting students will present and respond to work in progress. Across the semester, the seminar will treat challenges of bibliographic research and strategies of effective writing specific to large projects.
CRN 40212
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Required for all PhD students preparing the dissertation prospectus.

ENGL 8936: Issues in Scholarship and Academia (Mondays 11:30 AM - 2:00 PM)
Maria Farland
This 0-credit seminar, open to all doctoral students, provides a forum in which to discuss the issues that shape the pursuit of a career professing literature as well as the pursuit of a career outside of the academy. The semester will provide opportunities for workshopping writing-in-process in a collaborative and supportive environment, and for directed conversation on varied aspects of the academic professionalization.
CRN 14025
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