Recent Seminars & Topics Courses

English department faculty teach graduate seminars and readings courses on a variety of topics. These may be designed thematically, or center on specific authors or aspects of critical theory.

Select recent 5000-level readings courses:

  • 18th Century Transatlantic Revolution, 2024
  • Black Women's Fiction, 2022
  • Chaucer, 2017
  • Colonial America in the Atlantic World, 2022
  • Digital Perspectives, 2014
  • Fascisms, Empires, Visualities, 2016
  • First Person Singular, 2016
  • Henry James and Literary Criticism, 2014
  • History & Theory of the Novel, 2019, 2017
  • Hybrid Literature, 2020
  • James Baldwin, 2021
  • Labor, Work, and Class in U.S. Literature and Film, 2015
  • The Literary Community, 2019
  • Minnesota Poets, 2017
  • Moral Action and the Arts, 2021
  • Mutations in Ekphrasis: A Writing Laboratory, 2019
  • Political Novels, 2018
  • Prose Poetry and Hybrid Prose, 2017
  • Reading and Readers, 2018
  • Realism, 2020, 2019, 2016
  • Revolution in the 18th-Century Atlantic, 2020
  • Science and Scientism in the Humanities, 2017
  • Sensibility, 2020, 2021
  • Sublime Politics and the End of Existence, 2015
  • The Art of Change, 2022
  • The Rise of the Public Sphere: Criticism and Taste, 2022
  • The Treaty Moment: Promises in Native Law and Lit, 2018
  • Work in English Culture, 2015
  • Writing a Life: Craft in Character, 2024
  • Writing About the Visual Arts, 2017
  • Writing Culture into Memoir, 2021
  • You Bought a Guitar to Punish Your Ma–Writing About Rock and Roll Music, 2015

Select recent 8000-level seminar courses:

  • African Americans in the Great Depression, 2017
  • American Places/Modern Times, 2017
  • Asian American Literary and Cultural Studies, 2017
  • Britain and the Islamic Mediterranean, 2020
  • Child Narrators, 2020
  • Classical and Biblical Reception, 2019
  • Contemporary Literature and the Environment, 2023
  • Dialectics and Dialectical Thought, 2014
  • The Early Modern Mediterranean World, 2014
  • Eco-Theory, Digital Humanities, and New Materialism, 2020
  • Ecocritical Food Studies, 2018, 2024
  • Ecocriticsm and the Environmental Humanities, 2020
  • Experimental Forms, 2020
  • Global Shakespeare, 2020, 2018, 2015
  • Illustrated Periodicals, Material and Digital, 2021
  • The Literature of Abolition in Britain and America, 2024
  • Lit, Politics, and Culture of the Civil Rights Era, 2019
  • Modern Madness: Discourses of Unreason, 2023
  • Narrative Challenges in Memoir, 2020
  • North American Occupations, 2020
  • The Pain of Others, 2015
  • Postcolonial Studies Now, 2023
  • Postcoloniality, Human Rights, Justice, 2016
  • Power in Theory and Practice, 2019
  • Race and Performance, 2020, 2015
  • Reading Difference, 2020
  • Recent Trends in Theory - Humans and Things, 2023
  • The Rise of the Public Sphere: Criticism and Taste, 2017
  • Said and Vico, 2016
  • Science and Scientism in the Humanities, 2014
  • Shakespeare and Marlowe, 2016
  • Time, Structure, and Chronology, 2020
  • Transatlantic Environmental Humanities, 2015
  • The Unconcealed in Experimental Writing, 2018
  • Victorian Poetry, 2019
  • What Good Are the Arts? 2016