2026–2027 Graduate Seminars
This is a list of the courses we are planning to offer in 2026–2027. Unforeseen circumstances can lead to last-minute changes before the start of the Fall 2026 academic term, but this list is firm as these things can be at this stage of our planning.
ENGL 813 Psychoanalysis and Culture
Instructor: Angela Facundo
Since its inception, psychoanalysis has experienced an oscillating and ambivalent reception, but its impact on culture is unequivocal. The unconscious, the Oedipus Complex, the fetish – these are the kinds of psychoanalytic concepts that gained steam in the cultural imaginary, giving birth to clichés and psychical insights alike. This course begins with Freud and traces how psychoanalytic discourse evolves through conceptual and methodological disagreements. We will explore intersections between psychoanalysis and twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, visual art, and film. We will explore themes such as repetition, rupture, eroticism, horror, abjection, dreams, play, love, and hate.
ENGL 817 Publishing Practicum
Instructor: Margaret Pappano
This seminar takes students through revision and submission stages from draft essay to article publication. The first section of the course will be devoted to discussion of the differences between coursework papers and published articles, and to a presentation and peer revision cycle of each student’s work. The second section of the course will discuss how to decide where to send article submissions, how to present them, and what to expect of the process. If there is time, we will build in a conference proposal/presentation stage. Students must have a complete draft essay to bring to the start of the course and be ready to welcome reading and response from peers. Success in the course requires regular attendance, constructive participation, revision responsive to instructor and peer review, and submission to an appropriate scholarly venue for publication.
ENGL 824 King Arthur: Medieval to Modern
Instructor: Ruth Wehlau
This course will examine a selection of Arthurian texts, beginning with the earliest Welsh legends and then following the tradition into the present day. Works to be read include selections from major interpreters of the legend over a period of 900 years, including Geoffrey of Monmouth, Sir Thomas Malory, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and T. H. White. Apart from these better-known writers, many other authors and poets have employed Arthurian themes and narratives in their work. Students will be asked to research some of these works and to choose a few to include in the course. Ultimately we will piece together a history of the tradition that includes a variety of high cultural and popular interpretations of the narrative over time. Throughout the course, we will return to the following central questions: What cultural purposes do myths of King Arthur serve? Whose values do they reflect? To what extent do they engage with the early medieval past, and to what extent with the concerns of their later interpreters?
ENGL 835 Embodied Communication and the Early Modern Playhouse
Instructor: Jade Standing
One of the most popular Elizabethan performers was Richard Tarlton of the Queen’s Men, a clown with an extraordinary talent for improvisation who was also an expert fencer, dancer, and musician. He was culturally influential. His antics are repeated and lauded in the popular literature of his day; he was the mentor of the Shakespearean clown, Robert Armin; and he is the probable source of inspiration behind Shakespeare’s Yorick in Hamlet. Taking the versatility and enduring legacy of Tarlton’s performance skills as its starting point, this course will examine the non-verbal ways in which meaning was produced by all early modern players for first audiences of the plays of Shakespeare and contemporaries. The course proposes that the skills of improvisation, physical co-ordination, timing, balance, and ‘reading’ people were integral to the dramatic success of players and the storytelling of the playhouse stage. We will explore historical sources that offer insight into rehearsal practices; actors’ physical conditions; the energy, feel, and sound of a play in performance; and the competence of the audience to ‘read’ the various kinds of embodied communication that transformed and deepened meaning-making in plays. We will engage with theatre history, cultural history, and performance studies scholarship on stage direction, the provincial and international travels of players, and local customs which brought communities together through dancing, singing, acting, and sports like fencing. Our purpose here is to arrive at an informed understanding of the central place of movement arts in Shakespeare’s and other playwrights’ works. Finally, we will turn to a range of plays to interrogate how our reading practices have been altered and strengthened by our contextual discoveries.
ENGL 841 Epistolarity in the Eighteenth Century
Instructor: Leslie Ritchie
You’ve got mail! The trope of a bag of letters opened to the reader’s gaze is surprisingly common in eighteenth-century literature. This course looks at a selection of eighteenth-century letters, letter-writing manuals, and fictions and dramas that depend upon letters to examine what makes epistolary form so fascinating. Texts will include works by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett, and others.
ENGL 858 Middlemarch and the Utopian Impulse
Instructor: Ronjaunee Chatterjee
This course will center theories of utopia anchored in a long reading of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Famously a “no place,” utopian thinking crosses literature, design and architecture, politic theory, film and art. We will use Middlemarch—in which utopian ideas arrive via glimmers and potentialities in the text—to think carefully about utopia’s relationship to realism. We will read criticism and theory by Marx, Adorno and Ernst Bloch, Anahid Nersessian, Gary Wilder, José Esteban Muñoz to additionally consider the place of utopian thought for the present.
ENGL 859 Victorian Gothic
Instructor: S. Brooke Cameron
This course will look at the evolution of British Gothic fiction across the nineteenth century. We will start with a discussion of early Gothic literature, differentiating between terror and horror (the Schauer-Romantik school), and then consider how the Gothic and science fiction come together in Mary Shelley’s iconic Frankenstein. We will look at how Gothic conventions were popularized by the penny dreadfuls and then became mainstream through a sampling of fiction by the Brontë sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Braddon. We will look at the queer Gothic and the rise of sexual anxiety in the latter half of the century – through discussion of works by JS Le Fanu (Carmilla), R.L. Stevenson (Jekyll and Jyde), and Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray). We will also use these texts to build towards a conversation on the Imperial Gothic in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire, and we will conclude the course with a discussion of the Gothic at the fin de siècle in short fiction by Aesthetes and Decadents. We will conclude the course with a unit on the neo-Victorian Gothic in modern media, including film and videogames. Throughout the course we will consider how Gothic fiction participates in a changing social and political landscape (including nineteenth-century anxieties around science, Empire, history, and changing gender roles), and we will look at the genre’s legacy through reference to modern horror (eg. Slasher films, fear of contagion, and body horror).
ENGL 862 Woolf, Eliot, and Shakespeare
Instructor: Gabrielle McIntire
T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf were highly experimental avant-garde modernist writers who changed ideas both about what could be written about and how one could write. At the same time, Eliot and Woolf include explicit traces from a wide range of prior literature through their generous use of intertextuality and allusion. One of the foremost presences in both of their works is William Shakespeare. Texts will likely include Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Orlando, and A Room of One’s Own; T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land; and Shakespeare’s As You Like It, The Tempest, Cymbeline, and Hamlet.
ENGL 863 Arts – Design – Entertainment
Instructor: Glenn Willmott
This course will take us on a whirlwind tour across the jagged landscapes of modernist innovation, both avant-garde and popular—taking in literary fiction, poetry, drama, pulp genres (crime, science fiction and fantasy), comic strips and books, visual arts and architecture, fashion and design, music and dance. Our starting point will be current debates about the scope and meaning of the term modernism, followed by an exploration of its diverse formal experiments and social and intellectual concerns in the first half of the twentieth century.
ENGL 865 Data-ism
Instructor: Molly Wallace
It would be difficult to understand the present without recourse to the concept of “data.” “Data” is everywhere and at all scales. It defines our understanding of the planet and its climate crises; it circulates between countries in innumerable forms, from currencies to memes; it affects every profession and field; it shapes what we eat, how we sleep, what we wear; it affects our senses of ourselves as individuals and collectives. As Noah Yuval Harari has argued, we are witnessing a “shift in authority in almost all fields of human activity.” If we once looked to a God in “the clouds” for authoritative guidance, we are increasingly now looking for such guidance in “the Cloud,” as algorithms, guided by data, seem to know us, “even better than we know ourselves.” (The recent advent of AI “Jesus” in a church in Switzerland is surely this moment’s apotheosis.) This course will attempt to come to terms with this new faith, reading both popular nonfiction (like Harari’s Homo Deus) and fiction (may include Eggers’ The Circle, Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Powers’ The Overstory, Okorafor’s Death of the Author, or Wilson’s Robopocalypse). Throughout, we will ask what role literary studies might have in a data-driven world. Students should expect to read extensively, participate actively, and write independently (without the “aid” of AI).
ENGL 866 Contemporary Autobiography
Instructor: Yaël Schlick
This course will explore women’s autobiographical writing in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will study the genre of autobiography generally, and examine the issues and challenges that attend women’s autobiographical narratives in particular. Authors/works studied will likely include: Carolyn Kay Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman, Deborah Levy’s Things I Don’t Want to Know, Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons!, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, and Colombe Schneck’s Swimming in Paris.
ENGL 873 Hockey, Social Justice, and Cultural Production
Instructor: Sam McKegney
A study of nationhood and responsibility through literature and film
Although the dominant culture of ice hockey in lands claimed as Canada has been steeped in nationalist nostalgia and heteropatriarchy, the meteoric popularity of Heated Rivalry and the marketing of the newly minted Professional Women’s Hockey League as a feminist, queer-positive space suggest the culture of the game is far more dynamic than it might initially appear. Hockey can be a site of contention, struggle, and even possibility. This course examines cultural productions of hockey across diverse media—novels, short stories, poetry, songs, films, tv shows, podcasts—in relation to issues such as gender, sexuality, race, economics, nationhood, colonialism, and the environment. Armed with critical readings in Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, Queer Theory, and the History and Sociology of Sport, we will study works by creators like Rachel Reid and Jacob Tierney, Nancy Doud, Frederik Backman, Roch Carrier, Matt Robinson, Judith Alguire, Kyle Edwards, and Richard Wagamese.
ENGL 884 Race, Repertoire, Archive
Instructor: Kristin Moriah
Black feminist scholar Jennifer L. Morgan has explained that “the archive carries ‘the force of law,’ and through the conservation of documents and evidence it is situated at the intersection where change and stasis meet—it is both ‘revolutionary and traditional.’ ” In this course, we will tarry a while at the juncture of change and stasis. We will attempt to mine the relationship between Black Studies, Black literary criticism, and the archive. We will take for granted that the history of the Black diaspora is written corporally and textually. How, then, do archival theories and practices supplement interdisciplinary modes of knowing and reading or illuminate issues like embodiment, performance, and representation? How have Black writers and theorists mined the archives, and what might we learn from them? To answer these questions, we will turn to the work of Michel-Rolph Troulliot, M. NourbeSe Philip, Saidyah Hartman, Robert Reid-Pharr, C. Riley Snorton, and others. We will speak to archivists and theorists whose work is informed by Black archival practices.
