Graduate Courses


Summer 2024 Graduate Courses


EH 590 - Royal Orbits in Historical Fiction | Halbrooks
FULL SUMMER TERM: MAY 29 - JULY 26
MW 2:30-5:00

This course will focus on historical fiction that attempts to recreate the early modern world. Specifically, we will read three recent novels that focus on figures within royal orbits: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Arthur Phillips’s The King at the Edge of the World, and Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll. Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Thomas Cromwell, Elizabeth I, and James I all feature as major players in these books, along with scheming courtiers, a baffled Turkish physician, a tight-rope-walking trickster, and a hapless king without a kingdom. The course will be blended, with some in-person meetings and some asynchronous, online work, which will allow students to develop independent research projects, which they will present at a colloquium at the end of the term.


EH 592 - Gender & Lit: Women & the Macabre | McLaughlin
MAYMESTER: MAY 6 - MAY 24
MTWRF 1:00-3:30

If it is true that the Enlightenment gave birth to the Gothic, its light creating the dark shadows in which lurk that which resists human understanding, then it is equally true that the Gothic, with its locus in the irrational maze of the human psyche, prefigured and gave rise to psychoanalysis. Because psychoanalysis is itself a gothic discourse with its exploration of the death drive, family secrets, buried memories, hysterical fits, obsessive thoughts, erotic dreams, and mirror images, it will be the theoretical lens through which we will explore the relationship between women and the macabre in contemporary literature.


Fall 2024 Graduate Courses


EH 502 - Graduate Writing for English | Cesarini
M 6:00-8:30

Our work as researchers and teachers does not necessarily make us good writers. There are varieties of academic writing in English, all with their own conventions that can be learned. Students in EH 502 will study representative examples of scholarly writing in English, so that we can understand its diversity over time, across sub-fields, and in different venues. Students will also undertake their own projects, in studied steps, from project proposal, to literature review, to annotated bibliography, culminating with a conference paper.


EH 505 - Teaching College Writing | Shaw
MW 2:30-3:45

This course examines issues in composition history, theory, and pedagogy in the context of teaching first-year composition. Students will use this knowledge to develop course material appropriate to teaching first-year composition. Topics include syllabus and assignment design, lesson planning, course management, teaching in the linguistically and culturally diverse classroom, and assessment. Pre-requisite / Co-requisite: EH 502.


EH 521 - 17th Century Poetry | Hillyer
R 6:00-8:30

We will be studying representative poems by Ben Jonson and by some of the men of letters more or less closely associated with him: the so-called Cavalier Poets. The main assignment will be a research paper of 20 pages developed in stages. I will also require each student to give at least one oral report, based on the critical essays included in the same anthology we will be using for the primary texts. 


EH 572 - Modern American Fiction | Raczkowski
W 6:00-8:30

The modernist novel in the United States was never singular, but took on a number of forms ranging from the experimental or "high" modernism of Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner; to the popular modernism of Anita Loos; to the Harlem Renaissance modernism of Nella Larsen and Rudolph Fisher. As a study of modernist fiction in America, the goal of this class will be to introduce students to some of these different modernisms while keeping an eye on the competing aesthetic and political arguments that modernist writers structured implicitly in their fiction and explicitly in their manifestoes, reviews and literary criticism.


EH 583/4 - Graduate Fiction Writing Workshop I/II | Prince
T 6:00-8:30

This course is a seminar, writing workshop, and directed study for graduate writers of fiction. Through tailored writing projects that range from short stories, novellas, and novel excerpts, students will learn to utilize peer and instructor feedback that leads to stronger, more original work. Students will also develop a greater understanding of the critical and cultural lineage of their work. Discussions and assignments will address the craft of writers foundational to the study of fiction. Conferences and independent projects will focus on literary journals and the submission process, when appropriate.


EH 591 - Writing the Contemporary American South | Johnson
W 6:00-8:30

This course asks students to interrogate and define for themselves what it means to write fiction about and from the contemporary American South. To do so, students will read creative works by contemporary Southern writers (Jesmyn Ward, Brad Watson, S.A. Cosby, Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, others), literary criticism, and scholarly pieces that contextualize certain conventions and traditions—for better and worse. Students will also write an original piece of fiction set in the contemporary American South and workshop it alongside their peers.