Graduate Courses
MA Students must take at least six graduate seminars that are numbered 700 or higher
PhD Students must take at least 13 graduate seminars that are numbered 700 or higher
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Graduate courses at the 600 level
History of Criticism II
Survey of perspectives and trends in critical theory relevant to literary interpretation from the middle of the twentieth century onward, including structuralism, post-structuralism, gender and race studies, cultural theory, post-colonial studies, environmental criticism. Frequent writing assignments of various lengths. This course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area(s): Philosophical Inquiry and Life’s Meanings.
EN 606 A1 Walsh
MWF 10:10 – 11:00a
Studies in Anglophone Literature: Comparative Readings in Postcolonial Literature
Examines how Anglophone writers have explored themes of historical upheaval and psychological transformation in the colonial world. We read criticism by Lukacs, Auerbach, Williams, and Said. Fiction by Rhys, Coetzee, Adichie, and others.
EN 686 A1 Krishnan
TR 11:00a – 12:15p
Critical Studies in Literature and The Arts
Spring 2026 Topic – Be Gay Do Crime: Homo(cidal) Villains
Sure, everything could be read as straight or platonic, but where’s the fun in that? Though the origin of the popular “Be Gay Do Crime” meme can only be traced back to 2016, there is a long-entangled history of queerness, criminality, and horror. Within the last ten years, conversations around representation in media have begun to touch on issues like queerbaiting and the “bury your gays” trope, but how far back does the cultural obsession with queer-coded villains extend? Using contemporary and canonical queer theory, this class aims to read these works through a new lens. Beginning with texts like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), and moving onwards and outwards to 1994 film Interview with the Vampire, and BBC’s Killing Eve (2018), this course will lean into the study of often villainous and antagonistic representations of queerness. This interdisciplinary, discussion-based seminar strives to answer the question: What remains at stake when queer tenderness is cloaked in tragedy and violence? How does race, gender, and sexuality further complicate the transgressive threats of queer tenderness? This seminar will focus on characters like HIM from the Powerpuff Girls (1998), and with care, deliberately center the positioning and reading of the queer villainous subject. Students especially interested in queer “Poor Little Meow Meow” characters, supervillains, fan work, marginalization, “toxic” or “problematic” representation, and queer coding in literature and film should take this class. This course is designed to familiarize students with research methods and current scholarship in the field of literary studies.
EN 694 A1 James
TR 11:00a – 12:15p
Critical Studies in Contemporary Literature
Topic for Spring 2026: Border Studies / Critical Forced Displacement Studies
The US southern border played a tremendous role in the 2024 presidential election for both parties, and immigration and deportation are likely to continue to be central political concerns, even as US resettlement of refugees has halted entirely. What makes borders and human mobility across them so important to political imaginaries, cultural constructions, and identity performances? This course will use the US southern border as a starting point to explore bordering practices around the world and the field border studies, which has emerged since the 1980’s as an interdisciplinary framework that examines how cultural practices create borders as spaces that: negotiate between national/cultural belonging and exclusion; question state sovereignty, security, and exceptionalism; and inspire creative contemporary literary and activist projects. Alongside theoretical texts, we will read literature by and about displaced communities and track discourses on borders and displacement in contemporary media. Authors include Gloria Anzaldúa, Vincent Delacroix, Josefina López, Valerie Luiselli, Kara Hartzler, and Luis Alfaro.
EN 698 A1 Preston
TR 9:30 – 10:45a
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Graduate seminars at the 700 level and above
States of Exception?: Seventeenth-Century Women’s Writing and the Media Revolution of the English Civil Wars
In his work identifying “civil war as the fundamental threshold of politicization in the West,” Giorgio Agamben turns to seventeenth-century England to develop his on-going theory of the state of exception. Drawing on this work, as well as other recent political theory and historical scholarship, this class will attempt to rethink the writing of seventeenth-century English women and its afterlives. In particular, we will consider the importance of the violence of the English civil wars to these women’s writing, as well as how their inclusion in the canon of “women’s writing” obscured the centrality of violence to their work. Issues of unjust imprisonment, the threat of sexual assault, and unprecedented executions inspired these writers to counter these states of exception by creating their own, like Lucy Hutchinson’s “pious fraud” or Margaret Cavendish’s army of Amazons. This class will explore the work of Hutchinson and Cavendish, as well as that of Philips, Behn, Astell, the female petitioners and a host of other female writers, resituating Agamben’s analysis of the English civil war via Hobbes in the context of a much more diverse set of voices. During this wartime period, the dual technologies of militarism (the development of siege warfare, etc.) and print culture (the “invention of the newspaper”) enabled a reorganization of the body and the domestic that problematizes readings of the politicized domestic, the public sphere, or the “private” as a place of resistance. This course will provide students both a foundation in the literary and political landscape of the seventeenth-century, as well as a point of entry into broader debates about state power, gender, violence, and the way that media revolutions and militarism move together. (This class can be taken for the WGS Graduate Certificate.)
EN 726 A1 Murphy
T 3:30 – 6:15p
Race and Literature: Indigeneity, Race, and Settler Colonialism
This course asks: what is the relationship between Indigeneity and racialization, and how do Black, Asian American, and Latinx communities engage with the processes of settler colonialism? While scholars in Indigenous studies have long sought to differentiate Indigeneity from race, many have also considered the longstanding relationships built between colonized and racialized communities. Literature has also examined these historical alliances and complications between Indigenous, Black, Asian American, and Latinx communities. Turning to literature, we will consider how Indigenous and multi-ethnic writers represent shared histories across racial and ethnic categories from plantation settlement in early America to histories of Chinese immigration during the California Gold Rush to recent family separations on the US-Mexico border. We will engage Critical Indigenous studies and Critical Ethnic studies work by scholars like Jodi Byrd, Iyko Day, Tiffany Lethabo King, and Shannon Speed alongside literature by Toni Morrison, LeAnne Howe, Jesmyn Ward, C Pam Zhang, Gerald Vizenor, Valeria Luiselli, and John Joseph Mathews, among others. We will also discuss the possible benefits, strategies, frustrations, and pitfalls of comparative reading practices.
EN 738 A1 Hunziker
T 12:30 – 3:15p
Topics in British Literature: Virginia Woolf (and After)
There is no way of reading Virginia Woolf without at the same time being read by her. Her enigmatic, exacting, and consistently astonishing fiction pushes us to reconceive our most basic assumptions about perspective, thought, narration, time, gender, being and nonbeing, as well as about our personal and artistic responsibilities in periods of political crisis. Woolf, as we will discover, is not just a brilliant writer of modernist prose, but one of our foremost critics of modernity itself, a singular theorist of gender, and an often-uncompromising interpreter of art’s meaning and its future. This course will read a selection of Woolf’s fiction as well as her exploratory and polemical essays, contemplating recurrent problems of subjectivity, experimentalism, metaphor, gender, and history. We will read Woolf both in the context of her contemporaries and across a series of conversations with later writers, artists and filmmakers who have followed in her tracks.
EN 747 A1 Foltz
W 2:30 – 5:15p
Topics In Literature: Major Authors and Methods in Nineteenth-Century US Literature
This course explores US literature from the mid-nineteenth century by pairing five major writers with five critical methods and themes: Emerson and philosophy; Melville and post-humanism; Poe and science; Douglass and print culture; Dickinson and archival research. One goal of the course is to present a series of author-centric case studies that will provide a high-level introduction (hopefully not an oxymoron) to a single period via multiple approaches. That is, this is something of a survey course designed to expose graduate students both to nineteenth-century American literature and to methods that can be applied to a wide range of subfields in literary studies. More ambitiously, the course will “think between” its case studies. We will seek connections between authors and texts that share historical contexts and intellectual concerns. We will examine differences between methods in a comparative mode and explore how methods operate in conjunction and competition with each other. Primary texts include Emerson’s essays, Poe’s short fiction (plus some poems and aesthetic theory), Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom and journalism, Dickinson’s poetry and letters, as well as Melville’s short fiction and Moby-Dick.
EN 767 A1 Lee
R 12:30 – 3:15p