English

• All students complete a capstone seminar that channels the knowledge they’ve accumulated into a discipline-specific project under close faculty guidance.
• You will be encouraged to present your academic and creative work at professional conferences through Sigma Tau Delta (the International English Honor Society) and other organizations, helping you develop your professional identity as you prepare to move on to employment or graduate work.
• Small, intimate classes allow you to work directly with passionate, diversely talented faculty and fellow students.

African-American Writers

This course provides an introduction to the African-American expressive tradition, including poetry, fiction, autobiography, song, and folktales from the 18th century to the present. Examining writers such as Douglass, Chesnutt, Brooks, Baldwin, Ellison, and Walker, this course works to delineate the critical and historical contours of the African-American literary tradition.

Food and American Identity

This course examines literature in multiple genres (e.g. fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, graphic novel, film/television, and long-form journalism) through the theoretical lens of food studies to understand how writers use food as a cultural object to point to issues of identity including race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, and systems of belief.

Bleak Houses: Shifting Landscapes of the English Novel

This course will cover the modern European novel through the thematic rubric of “love and lies.” This affords the opportunity to consider fiction not only as a medium of the novel but also as a discourse of self-expression, self-creation, and in the cases of some our lying protagonists, self-destruction. Students will focus on characters’ constructions of “truth” and “lies” as these concepts are informed by characters’ emotional positions. At its most ambitious, this focus on the dynamic of intersubjectivity not only provides important insights into the literature we will read but also enhances students’ understanding of the interpersonal connections that drive worldviews and narratives.