Graduate Seminars
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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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 Matthews
TR 2:00 – 3:15p
Asian American Studies: Theories and Methods
A brief overview of the theories and methods of Asian American studies across the humanities and social sciences to define a mode of inquiry and action inspired by legacies of activism, art, and survival from Asian diasporas in the United States, as a response to racism, exploitation, and empire. This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: The Individual in Community, Philosophical Inquiry and Life’s Meanings.
EN 652 A1 Rivera
TR 9:30 – 10:45a
Critical Studies in Literary Genres: Espionage Fiction
This iteration of “Critical Studies in Literary Genres” explores the birth and development of espionage fiction in the 20th century. We will identify the genre’s origins and trace its development through the Cold War. In doing so, we’ll cover topics like the detective story, colonial adventure, invasion fiction, and the domestic terror/revolutionary plot. This course also studies some of espionage fiction’s greatest works that engage with WWII and Cold War era spy craft and interrogates the relationship between “high” literary modernism and the “lowly” pulp genre of the spy novel. This course will cover theoretical topics alongside literary readings and will be relevant to students interested in the following areas: global politics, colonialism, imperialism, and empire studies; genre studies, narrative theory, and literary theory; gender and sexuality studies, masculinity; and existentialism and moral philosophy.
EN 674 A1 Hernandez
MWF 9:05 – 9:55a
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 2:00 – 3:15p
Topics in African-American Literature: Black Women & Life Writing
When society is designed to limit your life chances, surviving so that you might one day thrive requires deliberate effort and purpose-driven strategies. Black women are therefore some of the most intellectually rigorous citizens on the planet. In this class, we will explore works by Black women who have chosen to write about their lives. To honor each author’s rigor, we will focus on the deliberate choices about craft that shape their texts and the deliberate choices that shaped the lives represented by their well-wrought narratives. To bolster our critical and literary awareness, we will also consult research on biography, autobiography, memoir, and the distinctions among them.
Students should register for this course only if they are also willing to hone their oral presentation skills. Public speaking is a top fear among Americans; college-educated people need practice.
Required texts: Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861); Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More (2014); Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, & Dreams Deferred (2021); Uché Blackstock, MD, Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine (2024).
EN 688 Mitchell
TR 5:00 – 6:15p
Critical Studies in Literary Topics: Literature and Conceptions of Time 1750-1930
Between 1750 and 1930, momentous changes in technology (time-keeping at sea, extraction of coal, the railway, the telegraph, photography) and paradigm-shifting scientific theories (geology, astronomy, Darwinian evolution and thermodynamics) inspired the re-conception of time both in the sciences and in popular imagination. Nineteenth-century Britain witnessed the standardization of time; the twentieth saw Newton’s notion of absolute time fundamentally shaken. These developments had new, strange, and contradictory implications for understanding time, implications that fired the imaginations of many of the writers in this period. We explore the different models of time that 18th- and 19th-century and Modernist writers draw on when crafting their literary works. What happens to the human time scale when you set it next to millions of years? Why does Woolf elongate one moment and shrink major events into a parenthesis? How do writers convey the feeling of simultaneity? Is time measurable, absolute and objective, or fluid, relative and subjective? Literary authors include Jane Austen, Olaudah Equiano, Alfred Tennyson, Tom Stoppard, H.G. Wells, and Virginia Woolf.
We will explore these historical questions while learning to identify, analyze and evaluate narratives at work in a wide range of discourses: colonial, historical, autobiographical, scientific, exploratory, and literary. A key goal of the course is to recognize narratives that are explicitly and implicitly at work in a range of explanatory accounts, and to practice questioning the narratives of inevitability, progress, or doom that swirl around in 2025. We will think through competing and contradictory models of change over time.
We will ask how narratives open questions up and close those questions down, what events punctuate a narrative, and what creates a sense of closure. We will pay close attention to how and when an author releases information to the reader over time.
EN695 A1 Henchman
TR 9:30 – 10:45a
Environmental Humanities: Living Arctic
The interdisciplinary “environmental humanities” focus on how people interact with the more-than-human life forms and forces that historically have been conceived of as “nature” or “environment” in Western modernity. We will examine the relations between culture and nature/environment (or the “natureculture” continuum) across different disciplines, considering how these relations are situated, 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 “the human” as the central agent of earthly life opens up new ways of knowing and storying the more-than-human forms of life of our planet. To do this, will read cultural geography, Indigenous studies, anthropology, museology, literary theory and ecocriticism, philosophy, poetry and fiction, environmental history, science and technology studies, history of science, Arctic humanities, and energy humanities. Full length works we will read include: VanderMeer’s Annihilation, Inuit Poems and Songs, Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, and La Mettrie’s Man a Machine/Man a Plant. A few of the case studies focus on the Arctic world in order to model one possible pathway through wide ranging material (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 living laboratory forecasting climate change, the Arctic with its diverse communities makes possible unique understandings of human/environmental relations.
EN 749 A1 Craciun
T 3:30 – 6:15p
Topics In Literature: On The Road in American Literature and Film
This course “puts the geography of the United States in motion” (Nabokov, Lolita) exploring the various motivations for and consequences of taking to the road in classic American literature and films. Some characters migrate for a specific purpose; some are forced into it; some to relieve boredom or psychological stress. But the American preoccupation with mobility is always complex, combining spiritual, economic, and political aspirations that we will explore in a variety of modern cultural works, such as Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ford’s Grapes of Wrath, Ellison’s Invisible Man, Capote’s In Cold Blood; Marlon Brando films–The Wild One, The Fugitive Kind–Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Nabokov’s Lolita, Robinson’s Housekeeping, and contemporary films such as Thelma and Louise and Boys Don’t Cry.
EN 767 A1 Mizruchi
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
M 2:30 – 5:15p
Topics in Contemporary Literature
Critical Displacement Studies: Migration, Nation, Theater, and Performance
In light of the fact that 117.3 million people were displaced globally by wars and persecution at the end of 2023, what can theater and performance artists and researchers contribute? 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.” Many of us would like to believe that theaters of 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.
This course will explore the emerging field of critical displacement studies alongside refugee and migration studies and theories of disability, gender, and race. Several weeks will address the protracted displacement of Palestinian refugees alongside Jewish displacement and diaspora. We will read plays by and about contemporary refugees in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and North America. We will look closely at groups like the Bond Street Theatre practicing in Kuala Lumpur, efforts by the UNHCR and other NGOs to use theater therapy in refugee camps, the contrasting efforts of documentary filmmakers, and the practices and theories of “applied theater.” We will attempt to analyze both the aesthetics and the efficacy of these projects and productions, while keeping ethical questions and dilemmas foremost in or mind: What are the ethical implications of making theater, writing papers, even teaching seminars about the devastating global challenge of forced displacement?
EN 799 A1 Preston
F 11:15a – 2:00p (will be added to the University Schedule shortly)
Topics in Contemporary Literature:
Identity and Identity Politics: Histories and Futures
The term “identity politics” continues to vacillate from insult to celebration or problem to solution as it has for at least two generations now. Yet, despite the continuing explosion of scholarly, literary, theoretical and public work engaging “identity politics” (or an important corollary like “culture wars”), there remains little formal assessment of the very notion of “identity” itself. What are the histories of our identities—racial, sexual, gendered, economic, national, ideological or otherwise? And how have we come to inhabit, embody, and deploy them? Drawing from a range of texts from multiple sites of political opinion across the 20th and 21st Centuries, this class dives into the exciting but often controversial histories and futures of identity and the forms of politics and modes of expression it enables. This range is meant not only to provide a wide-screen picture of contemporary debates and assumptions, but to use the tools and techniques of interdisciplinary study to sharpen our understanding of what might be the core of many contemporary cultural tensions and political anxieties.
EN 799 B1 Chude-Sokei
R 3:30 – 6:15p (will be added to the University Schedule shortly)