In this course, we ask what we can learn about apocalyptic thought — the long tradition of beliefs about the end of the world — from medieval literature. How did people in the Middle Ages understand war, famine, pestilence, and death? How did they use these themes to create art? And what do their experiences and understandings teach us today? This course is a part of an Honors Learning Community with Dr. John Young’s “Historical Inquiry” course entitled “The Four Horsemen.” The learning community involves seminar-style, discussion-based classes, and it will conclude with an interactive “Reacting to the Past” game.

This cross-listed English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course surveys several important medieval genres (especially romance and saints' legends) through the lens of gender and sexuality. In addition to practicing skills of close reading and literary analysis, students learn to read texts in Middle English (with the help of glossed editions). Throughout the class will situate their interpretations within conversations around gender and sexuality from the Middle Ages as well as from today.

In this course, students are introduced to a variety of texts written in England in the later Middle Ages (late 13th-15th centuries). But the experiences recounted in these stories take us far beyond the borders of England into lands both real and imagined. By reading the texts on our syllabus in conversation, we not only explore several foundational literary genres, but we also ask how medieval authors and readers conceived of themselves and their communities in relation to the wider world.

This course studies the works of William Shakespeare through the lens of his sources and his afterlives. We explore five plays from a variety of genres to understand Shakespeare’s plays not as exceptional works, but as entities both drawing on the past and gesturing toward the future.

This course examines Renaissance literature through the lens of romance, epic, and fantasy. The first half of the course considers Edmund Spenser's monumental Faerie Queene, with special attention paid to Spenser's use of allegory and his relationship with and expansion on medieval Arthurian narratives. Later in the course, we consider other Renaissance “fantasy” writers including William Shakespeare, Robert Greene, and Francis Beaumont.

A survey of major English works and authors from Beowulf through the 18th century, this course considers its texts through the lens of the natural, the unnatural, and the supernatural. In addition to learning about the historical contexts that shaped and were shaped by the texts on the syllabus, students also explored the continued relevance of texts from the past in today's world.

This course is designed to give students an introduction to various genres of literature and to basic methods of reading and literary analysis common in the academic study of literature. In this section, we ask "What is a monster?" and, conversely, "What is a human?" Our texts include epic poetry, novels, and plays ranging from the beginnings of English literature to the present. Each text presents its own answer to the question of monstrosity, which we will unpack together as we practice close and careful literary analysis.

What does it meant to read Chaucer as a London poet? Who were Chaucer’s fellow London-based authors, and how did the city influence their work? In this upper-division study-abroad course, we focused on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales alongside works from Lydgate, Gower, Hoccleve, and modern poet Patience Agbabi, we used our London location to ask whether we could see our city as Chaucer saw it.

This fully enrolled lower-division course for non-majors explored the experience of imprisonment through the close, critical analysis of literary works written in and about prison. Authors ranged across time and genre and included Boethius, Chaucer, Dickens, and Defoe, among others.

Students in this course explore the past, present, and future of the English language. Taking a sociolinguistic approach our central question — What is English? — students explore the relationship between language and identity while honing their communications skills in a variety of modes and media. Projects have included an autoethnography, a collaboratively produced multimodal dictionary, and an infographic design.

Students considered the power and importance of “reading communities.” With reading communities across the country pushed into virtual spaces due to the global pandemic, we asked how technologies of the book create and sustain such communities. We looked to the past, present, and future of social reading as we practice our own communication skills Projects include a digital narrative, analytical infographic, and formal proposal.

This course taught the principles of written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal communication and multimodal rhetoric through an inquiry into the past, present, and future of book technologies. First-year students created advertisements for imagined book technologies of the future; curated a digital exhibit featuring rare books from the university’s special collections; and re-mediated digital texts into physical forms.