Graduate Courses

MA Students must take at least six graduate seminars (700 or higher)

PhD Students must take at least 13 graduate seminars (700 or higher)

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Graduate courses at the 600 level

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Thinking with Animals

In 1962, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss wrote that animals are good to think with.  Over the past decades, a rich new field of scholarly work on animal studies has grown up, spanning the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, literary studies, neuroscience, biology, political science, sociology and others.  This course uses literary texts and scholarly writings to think about a spectrum of questions:

  • In the Anglo-American tradition, how have human beings historically defined themselves against and in relation to non-human animals?
  • How have humans used animals?
  • How has industrialization changed the way we raise and eat animals?
  • What is the history of human treatment of animals and interest in animal rights?
  • What is the history of attitudes about animal sentience and animal minds?
  • What do animals tell us about the problem of knowing other minds in general?
  • Should animals have rights and on what grounds?
  • How does the world look different when we try to remove human beings and the individual human subject from the center of our thinking?
  • How have practices of observing animals changed and what is the history of anthropomorphism?
  • Why and how do literary writers turn to animals in their works? To defamiliarize a world centered on the human? As a surrogate self? In allegories? Fables? As characters?
  • How can the study of animals shake up our own assumptions of what the world is like?

EN 637 A1 Henchman

TR 3:30 – 4:45p

 

Native American and Indigenous Studies: Theories and Methods

This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of Native American and Indigenous Studies. While we will primarily read literature and Indigenous Critical Theory, this course likewise discusses ideas from disciplines including history, law, film and media studies, museum studies, and environmental studies to discuss how Native peoples advocate for issues important to Indian Country. We will read fiction, poetry, and drama by authors like Natalie Diaz, Louise Erdrich, Layli Long Soldier, Beth Piatote, Tommy Pico, and Leslie Marmon Silko. In addition to course readings, students will participate in walking tours in Boston, engage with online exhibits from the National Museum of the American Indian, attend local museums, and conduct archival research using online digital archives. Students will be expected to handle moderate reading loads and will engage in academic research through formal and informal writing assignments.

EN 653 A1 Hunziker

TR 9:30 – 10:45a

 

Critical Studies in Literary Genres

Fall 2026 Topic: The Artist Novel

What is the relationship between an artist and their art? This course surveys novels that have tackled exactly that question. In this class, we examine one of the most important modernist subgenres, the Künstlerroman, or novel of the artist. We will identify the genre’s origins, chart its development, and consider its relationship to its sister genre, the Bildungsroman. In doing so, we will learn how and why the twentieth century saw an explosion of artist novels. Through our readings, we will aim to understand the artistic sensibilities and social forces that shape the artist figure. We will also confront perennial questions about what it means to be an artist, such as the role of the artist in society; the relationship between the artist, their work, and the world; and the artist’s obligation to social, political, and national movements.

This course will be relevant to students who enjoy literature that captures inner life and experience as well as students interested in the following areas: genre studies, narrative theory, and literary theory; gender and sexuality studies, feminism, and masculinity; British, Irish, and American modernism; art, music, memoir, and creative writing. We will read novels (and some brief selections) from the following authors: Alison Bechdel, Willa Cather, Goethe, Radclyffe Hall, Tomson Highway (Cree), James Weldon Johnson, James Joyce, Jamaica Kincaid, W. Somerset Maugham, Richard Wright, and Virginia Woolf.

EN 673 A1 Hernández

TR 11:00 – 12:15p

 

Critical Approaches to Global Literature

This course explores the influence of English and European literary critics on colonized writers in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. We study how theories of culture, nation, and history traveled from the West to the non-West, and we will consider the ways in which non-Europeans writers borrowed, criticized and repurposed these theories. We are likely to begin the semester readings excerpts of Kant, Marx, Mill, Arnold, Weber, Eliot, Richards, Leavis, Koselleck. In the second part of the semester we will read writers from the colonial peripheries: James, Naipaul, Achebe, Soyinka, Ngugi, Dangarembga, Lim, Said, Spivak, Bhabha.

EN 682 A1 Krishnan

MWF 11:15a – 12:05p

 

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Graduate seminars at the 700 level and above

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Writing and Research for Graduate Students

For English graduate students in their first semester of coursework. Professional skills and knowledge essential for writing, research, and public presentations in graduate school. Topics include the history of the discipline; persuasive arguments and rhetoric in scholarly writing; library, archival, and other research; public speaking in academic contexts.

EN 701 A1 Chodat

R 9:30 – 12:00p

 

Environmental Humanities: Green Lands

 

The environmental humanities is a new interdisciplinary field exploring how people interact with the life forms and forces known as Nature or environment in Western modernity. The class examines the relations between culture and environment across different disciplines, considering how these relations are made and narrated in distinct social worlds. To do this we will also consider how understandings of “human” and “person” have been shaped across cultural, historical, gender, religious, political, and racial differences. Finally, we will explore how decentering humans as the central agents of earthly life opens up new ways of knowing and storying the more-than-human life of our planet. Readings will include cultural geography, Indigenous studies, anthropology, plant humanities, literary theory and ecocriticism, philosophy, poetry and fiction, environmental history, science and technology studies, Arctic humanities. Everyone will be working outside their comfort zone in this respect, and the main thing is to keep an open mind and remain curious. Schedules permitting, we can take some optional local field trips together.
Some readings focus on the Arctic world, mainly Greenland, in order to model one possible pathway through this wide ranging material. We will engage with Indigenous Greenlandic fiction, poetry and film in order to see how cultural, geopolitical, and colonial forces make possible distinct ways of relating to the natural world. (Seminar papers need not focus on this or any other particular geographical or temporal frame). As the fastest warming region on the planet, and one that continues to be represented by outsiders as a wilderness, a resource frontier, or a laboratory forecasting climate change, the Arctic with its diverse communities makes possible unique understandings of human/environmental relations. Graduate students from all disciplines are welcome to enroll in this interdisciplinary class.
 
EN 749 A1 Craciun

R 12:30 – 3:15p

 

Transnational Modernism

Drawing on examples from literature, art, photography, and history, this course examines how exchanges across racial and national frontiers shaped the development of modernism in the U.S. and the Caribbean. We begin by revisiting the significance of modernist cosmopolitanism, expatriation, and migration with a focus on the diverse legacies of intercultural dialogue among canonical or so-called “high” modernists, New Negro Renaissance writers such as Langston Hughes, the Black Chicago Renaissance poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and the fiction, nonfiction prose, and poetry of James Baldwin. Next, we examine transnationalism in a comparative New World context, turning to works by Aimé Césaire (from Martinique), the Guadeloupean poet St.-John Perse (translated by T. S. Eliot), and Derek Walcott (from St. Lucia). During our final sessions, we’ll explore cultural crossings with Asia in works by Ezra Pound, Richard Wright, Miné Okubo, Ansel Adams, Mitsuye Yamada, Sonia Sanchez, Ha Jin, and others.

EN 788 A1 Patterson

W 2:30 – 5:15p

 

Introduction to Recent Critical Theory and Method

This seminar offers an introductory survey of some of the schools and methods of contemporary literary study. The content of the course varies annually, but there is always an effort to survey influential current practices and recent developments in the discipline, with some attention to their historical emergence. Students are not expected to have an extensive background in literary theory or the history of criticism, and the seminar welcomes participants from other fields of graduate study.

EN 792 A1  Howell

M 2:30 – 5:15p

 

Topics in Contemporary Literature and Culture

Critical Displacement Studies: Palestinian and Jewish Displacement and Diaspora

In an article for American Theater titled “The Refuge of the Stage,” Simi Horowitz offers the subtitle: “What roles can theatre play in the global refugee crisis? Healing, representation – and diversion.” In light of the fact that 117.3 million people were displaced globally by wars and persecution at the end of 2025, many of us would like to believe that arts about displacement offer “healing, representation, and diversion” that is consequential, but this seminar will work to hold the questions about the value of art and our own research at the center of our inquiry – without resorting to easy or convenient answers.

Using the central example of Jewish and Palestinian displacement and diaspora, this course will explore the emerging field of critical forced displacement studies. This field builds on refugee and migration studies and theories of disability, gender, and race but positions the human rights to mobility at the center of inquiry. We will look closely at efforts by the UNHCR, UNRWA, and NGOs to use theater therapy in refugee camps, the efforts of documentary filmmakers, and the practices and theories of “applied theater” alongside plays, novels, poems, and stories that depict Jewish and Palestinian diaspora. We will attempt to analyze both the aesthetics and the efficacy of these projects and artworks while keeping ethical questions and dilemmas foremost in or mind: What are the ethical implications of making art and theater, writing papers, even teaching seminars about the devastating global challenge of forced displacement?

EN 799 A1 Preston

T 12:30 – 3:15p