English Undergraduate Courses

Fall 2026 courses, listed in numerical order.

English 115    American Experience (ALDU)

Lecture 1    MWF 8:00-8:50 AM        Instructor: Johannes Shephard
Introduction to literature, history, and images from and about diverse American cultures across historical eras. Readings include fiction, prose, and poetry, often supplemented by painting, photography, film, and material culture.  (Gen.Ed. AL, DU)

English 115    American Experience (ALDU)

Lecture 2    MWF 9:05-9:55    Instructor: Phoebe Glick
Introduction to literature, history, and images from and about diverse American cultures across historical eras. Readings include fiction, prose, and poetry, often supplemented by painting, photography, film, and material culture.  (Gen.Ed. AL, DU)

English 115H  American Experience Honors (ALDU)

Lecture 1    TuTh 10:00-11:15    Instructor: Hoang Phan
This course explores how American literature has contributed to broader social conceptions of American identity and collective imaginings of the “American Experience.” Focusing on the role of literature in modern historical understanding, we will study diverse and historically shifting definitions of American identity and the American Experience, as they were transformed by debates over nationhood and nationalism, slavery and freedom, immigration and citizenship, and by forms of social identification such as class, race, gender and sexuality. This course is open to first year Commonwealth College students. (Gen. Ed. AL, DU)

English 131 Society and Literature (ALDG)

Lecture 1    MWF 8:00-8:15        Instructor: Raihan Rahman
This course will explore the multilayered relations between society and literature from the critical perspectives of environmental humanities (EH). Anthropogenic climate change has emerged as one of the most severe and pressing crises in human history. The concerns regarding climate change and environmental degradation are not merely scientific but deeply embedded in human cultures and histories. In this context, it is crucial to explore the multifaceted implications of the climate crisis, what they mean for society, and how literature can help us to make sense of them. We will thus use the keyword ‘climate change’ for our study of society and investigate a wide historical scope and diverse literary archives and cultural experiences to contextualize our investigation. We will draw on environmental perspectives and literary methods to analyze varied literary and cultural productions to examine how the field of humanities is crucial to understanding climate change and its impacts on society. Through close readings, reflections, and discussions, we will investigate the significance of literary and cultural engagements with environmental concerns. In parallel, we will explore the key concepts of EH such as ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ and examine how these concepts function in different ways in different contexts and how the multiplicities of their meaning complicate our understanding of society. We will also examine how categories of race, gender, class, and ethnicity and structures of domination like capitalism and imperialism often determine our understanding of those concepts discursively and materially. An undertone of the course will be to critically evaluate the role of literature in communicating unprecedented crises, understanding their social fallouts, building environmental resilience, and imagining political responses and possibilities for building emancipatory and sustainable futures." (Gen.Ed. AL, DG)

English 131 Society and Literature (ALDG)

Lecture 2    MWF 9:05-9:55        Instructor: Daniel Amaral
Dystopia Tomorrow and Today. This course reads literature to ask how our current world could be called dystopian. Recent events have exceeded the claim that we live in dystopian times (climate calamities, AI-armed wars, buffoonish mediascapes, and zero political say for the vast multitudes of people). It’s become cliche to say that—at the intersection of 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451—“You Are Here.” Following a 2000s boom of popular dystopian fiction, does the term “dystopia” become another entertainment commodity, or can we still learn from it? Questions we might ask: Why has “dystopia vs utopia” proved insufficient in understanding the world’s complexity today? How do people hinder utopian imaginations through fear-mongering? How are dystopias of today conditioned by history; how might we adapt to survive the future? What are perspectives from marginalized people for whom the end of the world has long persisted? Exploring texts that speculate dystopia, we’ll grasp how literature makes, or unmakes, future worlds. Readings will include selected literary novels, stories, and poems, plus nonfiction on the topics of power, ideology, and control. (Gen.Ed. AL, DU)

English 131 Society and Literature (ALDG)

Lecture 3    TuTh 4:00-5:15    Instructor: Meenakshi Nair
Introduction to the multifaceted ways literature both shapes and is shaped by its social and historical contexts. Analyses of plays, poems, and fictional and non-fictional narratives drawn from around the globe and in different eras.  (Gen.Ed. AL, DG)

English 132 Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Culture (ALDG)

Lecture 1    MWF 9:05-9:55    Instructor: Adrianne Ackroyd
Introduction to literature through a lens of gender identity and sexuality.  Texts include fiction, plays, poems that deal with and inspire conversations about the public politics and personal experience of gender and sexuality, both in the past and present. (Gen.Ed. AL, DG)

English 132 Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Culture (ALDG)

Lecture 2    TuTh 8:30-9:45    Instructor: Tyler Clark
Introduction to literature through a lens of gender identity and sexuality.  Texts include fiction, plays, poems that deal with and inspire conversations about the public politics and personal experience of gender and sexuality, both in the past and present. (Gen.Ed. AL, DG)

English 141 Reading Poetry (AL)

Lecture 1    MWF 1:25-2:15    Instructor: Grace Celi
Reading Poetry: Embodied Encounters. What makes poetry the most rebellious and visceral of written mediums? In this course, we will investigate the logic of poetry as independent of prose and transcending intellect. By studying traditional forms and their subversions, we will attempt to map that logic, examining poetry’s defiant nature. By practicing recitation, memorization, and transcription, we will consider synesthetic as well as analytic encounters with a poem. We will investigate the sonnet, aubade, elegy, and lyric modes as evolving vessels for embodied experience. We will interrogate how apostrophe and address, form, metaphor, syntax, lineation, and sound make meaning by appealing to the sensorium. Finally, we will do a lot of reading aloud together, encouraging our bodies to learn the poem alongside our minds to expand our experience of language—as it lives on the page and in the body.

English 144 World Literature in English (ALDG)

Lecture 1    TuTh 8:30-9:45    Instructor: Nana Prempeh
This course explores how world literatures illuminate the human experience across time and place within the contexts of coloniality and a postcolonial world. Students will engage with major texts from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East, examining universal themes such as love, suffering, power, identity, and mortality alongside the specific cultural, historical, and linguistic contexts in which these works were produced. Expect to read and engage novels like The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah, The Dragon Can’t Dance by Earl Lovelace, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. Through close reading, discussion, and critical analyses, we will investigate how literature reflects, challenges, and shapes individual and collective identities, social values, and moral questions. By comparing literary traditions across cultures, we will gain insight into both the shared human concerns and the unique perspectives that make global storytelling so compelling. (Gen. Ed. AL, DG)

English 146 Living Writers (ALDU)(Creative Writing elective)

Lecture 1    TuTh 4:00-5:15    Instructor: Assemay Almazbekkyzy
This is an introductory course in the work of acclaimed contemporary writers who visit the class to interact with students. (Gen. Ed. AL, DU)

English 146 Living Writers (ALDU)(Creative Writing elective)

Lecture 2    TuTh 4:00-5:15    Instructor: Carmen Moses
This is an introductory course in the work of acclaimed contemporary writers who visit the class to interact with students. (Gen. Ed. AL, DU)

English 150 Writing and Society (SB, DU)

Lecture 1    MWF 8:00-8:50    Instructor: Oscar Garcia
In this course, we will investigate the field of “Writing Studies,” an interdisciplinary subject area at the intersection of literacy, communication, digital studies, education, and linguistics. This course aims to heighten your awareness of “writing” as a practice and concept through which we can better understand power relations writing reflects, creates, or challenges in society. The course invites students to explore writing in society through a problem-posing approach, focusing attention on how writing is understood, used, and learned. (Gen. Ed. SB, DU)

English 200 Intro to Literary Studies (Introduction to the major)

Lecture 1    MW 4:00-5:15    Instructor: staff
Introduction to literary study, concentrating on close reading and analysis of texts, writing and revising critical essays, and discussion of the issues that underlie the study of literature. Prerequisite: ENGLWRIT 112 or equivalent.  This course is open to English majors and minors only.

English 200 Intro to Literary Studies (Introduction to the major)

Lecture 2    TuTh 4:00-5:15    Instructor: TBA
Introduction to literary study, concentrating on close reading and analysis of texts, writing and revising critical essays, and discussion of the issues that underlie the study of literature. Prerequisite: ENGLWRIT 112 or equivalent.  This course is open to English majors and minors only.

English 200 Intro to Literary Studies (Introduction to the major)

Lecture 3    TuTh 11:30-12:45    Instructor: Jimmy Worthy
Lecture 4    TuTh 2:30-3:45    Instructor: Jimmy Worthy
This course will introduce students to intense literary analysis, or the practice of reading literature critically and actively. Through the study of different literary genres—the short story, speech, novel, drama, poetry, and literary criticism—and literary devices and terms, you will hone your critical reading, writing, and thinking skills. As this is also an introduction to the major class, you will be asked to think seriously about what it means to read, discuss, and write about literature as an informed English major as well as complete assignments designed to help you maximize your experience as an important part of the English Department at UMass.

English 201 Early British Literature (course in British literature before 1700 or 200 elective)

Lecture 1    MWF 10:10-11:00    Instructor: Steve Harris
Introduction to the literature and the literary imagination of the Middle Ages and Early Modern England. We will begin with a discussion of the nature of literary artifice before moving to a review of English historical and cultural contexts. We will discuss literary genre and form, style and convention, and the semantic and cultural force of fiction. Readings include Old English lyrics, Beowulf, Chaucer, Milton, Sidney, Spenser, Donne, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Marvell. Brief papers, quizzes, and a final project. Recommended for Sophomores and Juniors. English majors only.  Prerequisite: Gen. Ed. College Writing.

English 202 Later British Literature (course in British literature after 1700 or 200 elective)

Lecture 1    MW 2:30-3:45    Instructor: TBA
The development of British literature from the Enlightenment of the 18th century through the Romaticism and Realism of the 19th century to the Modernism of the early 20th century; literary response to scientific and industrial changes, political revolution and the technical and social reordering of British society.  Open only to English majors, and those studying at the University on international or domestic exchange.

English 204 Intro to Asian American Literature (ALU) (Anglophone/ethnic American literature or American literature and culture after 1865)

Lecture 1    MW 10:10-11:00        Instructor: Caroline Yang
This course will introduce students to literature and film by, for, and about Asian Americans. Students will learn a reading practice that consists of contextualizing the texts in their historical production as well as close-reading and critical thinking. Through reading, writing, discussions, and a final group video project, students will explore how Asian American literature shapes the construction of heterogeneous, diasporic, and transnational subjectivities that challenges the very notion of “Asian American” as a uniform identity and object of knowledge.

• 204 Disc 01AA. Fri 10:10-11:00 AM. Instructor: Helin Park.
• 204 Disc 01AB. Fri 11:15-12:05 PM. Instructor: Helin Park.
• 204 Disc 01AD. Fri 10:10-11:00 AM. Instructor: Pooja Shah.
• 204 Disc 01AE. Fri 11:15-12:05 PM. Instructor: Pooja Shah.

English 221 Shakespeare (AL)(early British literature or 200 elective)

Lecture 1    MW 12:20-1:10 + discussion     Instructor: Jane Degenhardt
A survey that covers Shakespeare's entire career, from early, sensationally bloody works like Titus Andronicus to the meditative late plays like The Winters Tale and The Tempest. Along the way, we'll investigate the language, the structure, and the elaborate plotting of some of the most famous (and infamous) works ever written in English. Special focus given to Shakespeare's revealing explorations of the interplay between family, political hierarchies, and desire; his interest in distant settings and peoples; and, perhaps most importantly, his attempts to dramatize the struggle of individuals to make sense of the worlds in which they live. Through careful reading and discussion, we will work towards an understanding of why plays that seem so removed from our day-to-day concerns have remained powerfully relevant for four hundred years. Three essays, a mid-term and a final exam. Attendance at lecture and consistent participation in discussion sections required.  (GenEd: AL)

• 221 Disc 01AA. Fri 10:10-11:00 AM. Instructor: Christina Muoio.
• 221 Disc 01AB. Fri 11:15-12:05 PM. Instructor: Christina Muoio.
• 221 Disc 01AC. Fri 11:15-12:05 PM. Instructor: Delaney Gonzales.
• 221 Disc 01AD. Fri 10:10-11:00 AM. Instructor: Delaney Gonzales.
• 221 Disc 01AE. Fri 10:10-11:00 AM. Instructor: Olivia Barry.
• 221 Disc 01AF. Fri 11:15-12:05 PM. Instructor: Olivia Barry.

English 254 Intro to Creative Writing (required intro to creative writing)(AL)

Lecture 1    MWF 10:10-11:00    Instructor: Nickolas Hedtke
Always Writing

                                                                 “Dust is watching life's talk show.”
                                                                                                                ― James Tate
Seeing the world as a writer doesn’t always mean putting pen to paper, it simply means appreciating the small details and artifacts of feeling that surround us and holding onto them. Sometimes those details are hard to find, they live in the background, but by taking a step back, and revising our focus, a world of inspiration will open up. By the end of this 4-credit course, you will produce five poems, two short stories, and two creative nonfiction pieces. In addition to reading published writing as a model, we will be reading from our own text messages, Yelp reviews, YouTube comments, blog posts, and interviews with the direct goal of witnessing the implementation of Always Writing––showing us how we can always be ready to capture magic, even in the classically mundane. We will learn from models, but crafting our own creative vision, evolving our instincts, and defining ourselves as artists is the main focus of this course. Always Writing will change how you see the world. You’ll learn how to find magic in the details. Let’s watch the world go by and hold onto it with words. Let’s have a blast.   

English 254 Intro to Creative Writing (required intro to creative writing)(AL)

Lecture 2    MWF 11:15-12:05    Instructor: Megan Brown
How to be Haunted, How to be a Haunting. What are you haunted by? A memory? An image? A person? In this multi-genre course, we will examine and craft essays, poems, and stories that confront what haunts us. The course will trace hauntings that saturate the poetry and prose of Ocean Vuong, Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allen Poe, and Margaret Atwood. This course seeks to redefine our understanding of being haunted to see how an idea, event, history, or sense memory haunts us. In the process of writing our own poetry, essays, and prose, we will examine how writers craft experiences that linger with readers. From their craft, we will learn not only to be haunted but also how to deploy these techniques to haunt our readers. Our class time will be composed of close readings, class discussions, and workshoping student writing. During our time together, you will write 2 stories, 5 poems, and 2 essays.

English 254 Intro to Creative Writing (required intro to creative writing)(AL)

Lecture 3    MWF 12:20-1:10    Instructor: Stephanie Chang-Cuello
Thresholds: Famous Last Words & Unforgettable First Lines. What makes a first line so compelling? What makes an ending so poignant? Together, we’ll attempt to answer these questions by surveying the topologies of a text, focusing on beginnings, endings, and emotional centers. Part of the exploration will ask students to attend to the everyday details that strike their attention: the flash of white in a beagle’s tail, a crackle of cold static from the radio, the first bite of a Cosmic Crisp apple on an autumn’s day. Our study will also delve into various works, ranging from Raymond Carver, ZZ Packer, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ted Chiang, Cal Newport, Carmen Maria Machado, Ocean Vuong, Mary Ruefle, T.S. Eliot, and many more. Class will be a hybrid of book club, craft discussion, workshop, generative writing sessions, and Q&As about the writing life. We may also hold class outside to spur the mind and find new ways to respond to the world. By the end of the course, students should develop a new appreciation of beginnings and endings, voice and craft, and produce original work in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that surprises, elates, and even sings.

English 254 Intro to Creative Writing (required intro to creative writing)(AL)

Lecture 4    MWF 9:05-9:55    Instructor: Shaina Isaacsen
Blurring Genre: Defining Form Through Hybridity. What is the difference between a poem, an essay, or a short story? In answering this question, definitions and constraints are imposed upon art, definitions which are always upended by new works that defy those boundaries. Yet, in our learning, we focus on definitions first, teaching from the canon onward. This class aims to flip this and start with craft first: What are the components of voice? How does structure impact subject matter? How is time conveyed throughout a piece? We will answer through intergenre study, connecting works of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, as well as work that resists definition. Primarily, we will focus on these resistant works, works of hybridity: the prose-poems, autofiction, the narrative essay, and works that defy any classifications. Instead of answering our initial question of what the difference is between genres, we will focus instead on what these genres can take from one another. We will respond in writing, generating an array of works, including narrative prose, poem, and essay. As Paul Lisicky writes, “As a queer person, I never knew how to fit very well into externally designated categories, especially when there were only two options for me.”

English 268 American Literature and Culture Before 1865 (either course in early American literature or 200 elective)

Lecture 1    TuTh 1:00-2:15    Instructor: Hoang Phan
Beginning in the Age of Revolution and ending in the Age of Emancipation, this course will focus on the relationship between American literature and the broader social transformations of this period. Studying the formal and thematic innovations of a range of American writers, the course will explore the various ways these writers responded to the radical upheavals of their times. What are the differing narratives posed by literary works of these periods, on the issues of territorial expansion, slavery, and national union; citizenship and democracy; social order and revolution? Reading widely and deeply, we’ll study the writings of Charles Brockden Brown, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass; Herman Melville; and Walt Whitman, among others. Throughout our readings we’ll examine the ways in which the literature of this period contributed to the imagined community of the nation, as well as raised problems for the dominant narratives of the nation. This course is open to English majors only.  Prerequisite: ENGLWRIT 112 or equivalent.

English 269 American Literature and Culture after 1865 (American lit after 1865 or 200 elective)

Lecture 1    MW 2:30-3:45    Instructor: Brenna Casey
This course explores the definition and evolution of a national literary tradition in the United States from the end of the U.S. Civil War to the present. We will examine a variety of issues arising from the historical and cultural contexts of the 19th and 20th centuries, the formal study of literature, and the competing constructions of American identity. Students will consider canonical texts, as well as those less frequently recognized as central to the American literary tradition in an effort to foster original insights into the definition, content, and the shape of literature in the United States.

English 300 Junior Year Writing (junior year writing or American literature after 1685 or 300 elective)

Lecture 1    TuTh 4:00-5:15    Instructor: Ruth Jennison
Topic: Resistance and Revolution in 20th and 21st Century American Poetry. How do American poets engage with struggles for social change? What strategies do they use to write about protests, strikes, boycotts, workplace and public occupations, sit-ins, pickets, and mass demonstrations? Our discussions and writing projects will explore how poetry offers ways for its readers to grasp capitalism as a system shaped by class war, racism and sexism. We will investigate the relationship between politics that take place in the streets and politics that take place on the page. Freewrites, short reflections, and longer papers will take up how our poets navigate their work as both militant activists and artists. We will close read and analyze new poetic vocabularies for imagining alternatives to capitalism. Texts will include poetry by Sol Funaroff, Louis Zukofsky, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Muriel Rukeyser, Amiri Baraka, John Wieners, Gwendolyn Brooks, Larry Eigner, Sonia Sanchez, Diane di Prima, Keston Sutherland, Sean Bonney, Stephen Collis, Kay Gabriel, and Bernadette Mayer.

English 300 Junior Year Writing (junior year writing or Anglophone/ethnic American or 300 elective)

Lecture 02    MW 2:30-3:45    Instructor: TBA

English 300H Junior Year Writing honors (junior year or 300 elective)

Lecture 03    TuTh 10:00-11:15    Instructor: Daniel Sack
Topic: Beckett Across the Arts. Course description forthcoming.

English 313 Intro to Old English Poetry (early British or 300 elective)

Lecture 1    MWF 12:20-1:10 PM    Instructor: Stephen Harris
Old English is a language spoken in Britain from the early 400s to the 1100s. In this course, you will learn to read it. It will give you a good grounding in English grammar as well as a solid sense of the origin of English vocabulary. Once you can read Old English, you are only steps away from reading Old Norse, the language of the Vikings, as well as Old Saxon and Old Frisian. As well as learning the Old English language, we will read Old English poetry, including "Caedmon's Hymn," "The Seafarer," "The Wanderer," "Dream of the Rood," "The Battle of Maldon," and the epic Judith, about a warrior maiden who leads her army to heroic conquest ("Sloh tha wundenlocc thone feondsceathan fagum mece ..."). It is like no other poetry in English. Reading it in the original language allows you to practice intense close reading, an essential component of a literary education. You will also be introduced to Norse and Celtic myths. Old English inspired J. R. R. Tolkien's Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It inspired Seamus Heaney's North as well as his Beowulf. And it was a profound influence on Jorge Luis Borges. We will examine runes and learn to make manuscripts. A working knowledge of English grammar is recommended.

English 319 Representing the Holocaust (300 elective)(ALDG)

Lecture 1    Tues 2:30-3:45 + discussion    Instructor: Jonathan Skolnik
Major themes and critical issues concerning Holocaust representation and memory in a global context.  The course examines literature, film, memoirs, music, visual arts, memorials, museums, and video archives of survivor testimonies to explore narrative responses to racism and the destruction of European Jewry and others during World War II.  There are no prerequisites. 4 Credits. (Gen.Ed. DG AL).

• 319 Disc 01AA. Th 1:00-2:15 PM. Instructor: Abi Mbaye.
• 319 Disc 01AB. Th 10:00-11:15 AM. Instructor: Abi Mbaye.
• 319 Disc 01AC. Th 2:30-3:45 PM. Instructor: Jon Hoel.
• 319 Disc 01AD. Th 10:00-11:15 AM. Instructor: Jon Hoel.
• 319 Disc 01AE. Th 11:30-12:45 PM. Instructor: Jonathan Skolnik.

English 329H Tutoring Writing: Theory and Practice Honors (WRLS Teaching/Tutoring or 300 elective)(TELA)

Lecture 1    TuTh 1:00-2:15    Instructor: Anna Rita Napoleon
Gen. Ed. College Writing 112 or 113 with a grade of "B" or better.  Students interested in the course should submit an application to [email protected] by March 06: (1) a formal letter explaining why the student is interested and has potential to become a writing tutor; (2) an academic writing sample (attached as a word or pdf file); (3) a resume and (4) the name and email address of the student’s 112 instructor or another instructor who can speak to the student's qualifications.  While the preferred deadline was set for March 06, additional applicants may be considered if seats are available. The strongest applications will be invited to an interview.

English 350H Expository Writing Honors (300 elective; WRLS Public/Prof Writing Course; Creative Writing 300 elective)

Lecture 1    MW 2:30-3:45    Instructor: John Hennessy
This course is designed for students who have a special interest in personal narratives, documentary forms, travel writing, and/or innovative approaches to feature writing. Students will read and write a variety of literary non-fiction forms, including memoir, documentary essays, and profiles, and the course will have a workshop component.  Texts will include works by Joan Didion, Helene Cooper, and others. Students will also be encouraged to try other forms of non-fiction, including travel writing, interviews, editorials, reviews, etc. Open to ALL students (not exclusive to Honors College students).

English 355 Creative Writing Fiction (300 elective/creative writing)

Lecture 2    MWF 11:15-12:05        Instructor: Hiya Chowdhury
A World of Style. In this course, students will engage with fiction through the lens of style—that is, by focussing on the particularities of syntax, diction, tone, and structure that make a writer’s work truly individual. Equally, we will assert that style is just as much a social construction: by examining the worlds of speech, culture, context, and social mores that inform a writer’s stylistic choices, we will consider that style is a mutable and highly localized concept. We will spend time with contemporary fiction from around the world in order to suggest that the concept of ‘high style’ as embodied by such writers as Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, and Marcel Proust is also being challenged by the audacious, culturally specific, and historically energized styles of writers like Can Xue, Han Kang, Rohinton Mistry, and Liliana Colanzi. Further, students will produce, workshop, and dissect their own fiction, focusing particularly on the stylistic building blocks that make their work unique. Ultimately, this course invites students to understand the embodied concept of literary style, to parse the works of contemporary authors to understand the different stylistic choices one can employ in their work, and to begin to construct their own stylistic footprints.

English 355 Creative Writing Fiction (300 elective/creative writing)

Lecture 1    MWF 1:25-2:15    Instructor: Aaliyah Quershi
Fiction and the Shape of Time. How do stories hold, stretch, and bend time? What happens when we slow a single moment to a page, or let years pass in a sentence? This intermediate fiction workshop explores time not only as a structural tool but as a propulsive narrative technique. We will consider how writers manipulate objects, memory, and duration to craft a well-paced narrative. We will also ask how time intersects with the identity and perception of a character. Readings will include novels and short stories from Fatima Farheen Mirza, Ayşegül Savaş, George Saunders, Danielle Evans, and Tony Tulathimutte.

In their own writing, students will experiment with flashbacks, fragmented timelines, and the compression or expansion of time. Through weekly workshops, we will generate new work or refine existing drafts. By semester’s end, each writer will have completed a 20-page portfolio of revised short stories that demonstrate an intentional, nuanced command of narrative time.

English 356 Creative Writing Poetry (300 elective/creative writing)

Lecture 1    TuTh 1:00-2:15    Instructor: Noah Hale
“Nature is a haunted house,” writes Emily Dickinson, “but Art—is a house that tries to be haunted.” Poetry is in constant communion with the past even as it haunts our present. In this course we will write ourselves into this tremendous poetic lineage: through group discussion and weekly poetry workshops, we will become more keenly aware of our stylistic choices and sympathetic and sensitive to those of others. We will also aim to experiment in several different types of writing, from abstraction and conceptualism to the more personal modes such as the lyric, observing how these modes have evolved over time. We will explore these modes even further by reading critical work by poets such as Alice Notley, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, Barbara Guest, Simone White and more, locating ourselves within a wider web of radical poetic traditions.

English 356: Creative Writing Poetry (300 elective/creative writing)  

Lecture 2: Mondays from 1:00PM - 3:30PM
This is a course designed to help the student find a unique voice in the work and to reinforce the fundamental skills of writing poems through close reading, with an emphasis on the image as well as the musicality of language. The heart of the course is student participation, focused on writing poems for review in class and commenting on work from others. In addition to workshopping, the course features craft exercises based on great poets from Walt Whitman to Lucille Clifton. The strengths of student writing receive as much attention as those areas in need of improvement.

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books. His latest book of poems is Jailbreak of Sparrows. His previous book, Floaters, won the National Book Award for Poetry. He is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump. Espada has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

English 358 The Romantic Poets (course in British literature after 1700 or 300 elective)

Lecture 1    MW 4:00-5:15 PM        Instructor: Suzanne Daly
Poetry of the Romantic period (1789-1832) including works by Anna L. Barbauld, Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Felicia Hemens, John Keats, Mary Robinson, Percy B. Shelley, Charlotte Smith, and William Wordsworth. Political, religious, and historical frames of critical reference will be brought to bear on our reading.

English 359 Victorian Imagination (course in British literature after 1700 or 300 elective)(Literature as History)

Lecture 1        MW 2:30-3:45    Instructor: Suzanne Daly
Legal definitions and popular conceptions of crime and criminal behavior underwent significant revision in nineteenth-century England, and the literature of the period registers major points of contention. We will read works of fiction and poetry that address the following questions: What kind of crimes did the Victorians like to imagine, to read about, and to punish vicariously through imaginative literature? What did criminality mean to them? What is narrative justice, and what formal and/or ideological functions does it serve? We will read fiction by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, Oscar Wilde, and Sarah Waters. Poets may include Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Swinburne, and Tennyson.

English 365 The Literature of Ireland (Anglophone or 200 elective)(Environmental Humanities)

Lecture 1    MW 2:30-3:45    Instructor: Katherine O’Callaghan
Irish literature (poetry, drama, novels, short stories) from the Irish Literary Revival to the present. Topics include colonialism, gender, race, language, nationhood, and intermediality; a particular focus on the importance of the environment and climate in Irish literary texts. Will include works by James Joyce, J.M. Synge, Augusta Gregory, Seamus Heaney, Claire Keegan, Kevin Barry, and more (Gen.Ed. AL).

English 366 Modern Poetry (300 elective or American literature after 1865)

Lecture 1        TuTh 2:30-3:45        Instructor: Ruth Jennison
This course is a survey of modern American poetry. Our guiding question will be: What is the relationship between modern poetry and capitalist modernity? Focusing on the period between 1890 and 1950 and working from a comparativist perspective, we will explore how various poets interpreted their shared historical context through different poetic forms and experiments. In addition to a broad overview of modernism's canonical authors (e.g. Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, W.C. Williams, Ezra Pound), we will spend significant time on the trajectories of African-American poetics (e.g. Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes), feminist poetics (e.g. H.D., Gertrude Stein) and Depression-era anti-capitalist poetics (e.g. Muriel Rukeyser, Kenneth Fearing). Throughout our readings and discussions, we will look at the ways in which our poets are a part of the shifting cultures, politics, and histories of the first half of the 20th century; their works address American imperialism, world wars, rapid industrialization, racism and anti-racism, working-class resistance, and the transformation of gender regimes.

English 379 Intro to Professional Writing (300 elective)(PWTC)(WRLS)

Lecture 1    TuTh 1:00-2:15    Instructor: David Toomey
Lecture 2    MW 4:00-5:15    Instructor: Dylan Newbrey
This course offers an overview of commonly encountered professional genres such as memos, reports, job materials, and grant proposals. Students gain practice writing in these genres, with an emphasis on clarity and concision. They develop more sophisticated research skills and gain experience in communicating specialized information to non-specialist readers. Finally, they are exposed to the range of professional writing careers as they explore writing on both theoretical and practical planes through consideration of audience, as well as wider professional, social, and cultural contexts. Prereq.: ENGLWP 112 or equivalent; junior or senior status with a cumulative GPA of 3.0 or better. (3 credits).

English 380 Professional Writing and Technical Communication I (300 elective)(PWTC)

Lecture 1    TuTh 11:30-12:45        Instructor: Janine Solberg
Introduces principles of technical writing, page design, and UX/usability. Students write and design a 20-25 page manual documenting a software program, usually Microsoft Word, suitable for use as a professional writing sample. Prereq.: ENGLWP 112 or equivalent; ENGL 379, which may be taken concurrently, with instructor approval (email [email protected]); Junior or Senior status with a cumulative GPA of 3.0 or better. (3 credits).

English 388 Writing, Rhetoric & Society (300 elective)(WRLS)(TELA)

Lecture 1    MW 4:00-5:15    Instructor: David Fleming
This course is an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of rhetoric, defined here as the art of persuasion. For nearly 2,500 years, rhetoric has been the central academic discipline for thinking about the adaptation of discourse to purpose, audience, occasion, medium, and subject matter. The earliest rhetorical arts were focused on public speaking in direct democracies; later rhetorics treated eloquence more broadly, including written discourse and its role in religion, science, commerce, art, and education. Contemporary rhetorical theories have expanded the purview of rhetoric to include visual media, digital culture, and nonverbal performance and to see rhetorical motivations lurking even in artifacts produced without conscious persuasive design. Rhetoric is useful as a critical tool for analyzing others’ discourse; as a practical art for inventing one’s own discourse; and as a theoretical discipline for interrogating the languages of social and political life. In this course, we’ll learn about and practice these various rhetorics. The course is also meant to help students meet relevant objectives of the English section of the Massachusetts Test for Educator Licensure (MTEL).

English 389 The Major and Beyond (WRLS)

Lecture 1    Tu 5:30-6:45         Instructor: Jennifer Minnen
Are you feeling uncertain about what you want to do when you graduate and how your English degree will translate into a career? If so, you’re in the right place! This course helps you understand and articulate the English major's considerable value, follow your own curiosity, and learn to actively shape your opportunities. Self-knowledge is key: knowing who you are, what makes you special, and what you want out of life. Through a mix of reflective and formal writing, group projects, and experiential learning, this course will help you hone your confidence, articulate your skills, explore vocational directions, and begin taking your next steps toward them! Sophomores, Juniors, and Seniors. (2 credits)

English 391P Literary Editing, Publishing, Programming (WRLS)

Lecture 1    TuTh 10:00-11:15        Instructor: Edward Clifford
(2 credits) In this course, students will learn skills related to literary programming, editing, and publishing. Topics will include strategies for and approaches to running a successful reading series, managing, and producing a literary journal, book publishing, and others. Students will have the opportunity to study and learn about the English Dept. journal Jabberwocky and to intern for the MFA's Visiting Writers Series. Students may also take the course to support their work on professional literary internships they have secured themselves.

English 455 Advanced Creative Writing Fiction (400 elective)(Creative Writing)

Lecture 1    MW 5:30-6:45    Instructor: TBA
A seminar in writing short stories and other fiction for advanced creative writing students. Students read in contemporary fiction and in craft topics; write regularly and discuss one another's writing. Prerequisite: ENGLISH 350, 355, or 356.

English 456 Advanced Creative Writing Poetry (400 elective)(Creative Writing)

Lecture 1    Tu 4:00-6:30        Instructor: Peter Gizzi
We will question the relationship between world and word and ask who is speaking in a poem. Do we speak or are we spoken? We will consider the role of mystery, presence, and intimacy in our writing. The workshop consists of work-shopping poems each week, providing comments and edits on others work, handing in revisions, discussing books of poetry and/or essays, participation and attendance are required. Prerequisite: ENGLISH 350, 355, or 356.

English 468 James Joyce (Anglophone or 400 elective)

Lecture 1    MW 4:00-5:15    Instructor: Katherine O’Callaghan
From one hundred-letter thunderwords to falling giants and pirate queens, this course allows you to delve into the magical prose world of one of the world's most innovative writers. In "The Writings of James Joyce" we will discuss Joyce's short story collection Dubliners, his semi-autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, his modernist epic Ulysses, as well as sections from his extraordinary masterpiece Finnegans Wake. The emphasis will be on a close textual examination of Joyce's prose, as well as historical, cultural, and political contextualizations. Joyce's musical content and inspirations will be a dominant theme of the course. His character, Stephen Dedalus, worries that his "souls frets in the shadow" of the English language, but we will discover how Joyce reinvents English for his own purposes. For English majors only.

English 491UX UX for Writers (400 elective)(WRLS)

Lecture 1        MW 2:30-3:45    Instructor: Janine Solberg
Think of your favorite app or website — and then think of one that made you want to throw your phone across the room. What's the difference? Why do some digital tools feel effortless while others are confusing, exhausting, or even manipulative?

In this course, we’ll explore some of the ways that writers and designers working in User Experience (UX) fields make digital tools and information easier and more enjoyable to use. A cornerstone of UX work is empathy: a desire to better understand the needs of people using an app, website, or text. For example, writers who work on public-facing content—such as information that appears on government websites about healthcare, regulations, or public programs—may use UX methods to ensure that people can find and use the information they need. These methods (drawing from psychology, design, writing studies and rhetoric) have much to offer us as writers when it comes to creating online texts and spaces that are more inclusive, accessible, ethical, and humane.

You’ll learn about UX concepts (such as human-centered design, deceptive patterns, plain language) and practice applying UX methods like user interviews and usability testing (observing people as they try to use an app, website, or document). By the end of the semester, you’ll have completed a hands-on project that you can include in a portfolio or discuss when applying for jobs or internships. This course is geared toward students curious to learn more about UX as a career path for writers, those interested in adding UX concepts or research methods to their existing skillset, or students in areas of study that emphasize writing or digital technology (such as PWTC, WRLS, Digital Humanities). No special technical experience is required—just curiosity about how digital spaces shape our lives, and a desire to make them better.

English 494EI Writing, Identity & English Studies (IE)

Lecture 1    MW 2:30-3:45        Instructor: David Fleming
Writing, Identity, and English Studies is a nonfiction writing course designed to satisfy the University’s Integrative Experience (IE) requirement. Like all IE courses, it asks students 1) “to reflect on and to integrate” their learning in college, from their major to their General Education courses, their electives, and their extracurricular experiences; 2) to practice key “Gen Ed” objectives, such as oral communication, critical thinking, and interdisciplinary perspective-taking; and 3) to apply what they’ve learned to “new situations, challenging questions, and real-world problems.” This course is a writing-intensive version of the IE, designed for senior primary English majors. We’ll approach the IE goals through the genre of the personal essay. Across five writing projects, you’ll look back at your college education, identifying key moments and themes; you’ll review your work in English and assess where you are in that discipline: what projects you have found meaningful and what you’d like to do more of in the future; and you’ll imagine how you might apply the knowledge and skills you’ve acquired in college to problems, communities, and opportunities beyond. We’ll use an anthology of personal essays as prompt and model. At the end of the semester, you’ll collect your work in an e-portfolio, showcasing your knowledge, skills, accomplishments, and aspirations.

English 494NI The Next Chapter: Interactive Fiction (IE)

Lecture 2    TuTh 11:30-12:45    Instructor: Daniel Sack
Course description forthcoming.

English 494NI Next Chapter: Nature, Climate Change and Literature (IE)(Environmental Humanities)

Lecture 1    TuTh 8:30-9:45    Instructor: Malcolm Sen
Artefacts in the Anthropocene.  Artefacts used to decay faster than geological processes. A bronze sword rusts; a clay pot crumbles. The Anthropocene (when humans behave like geological agents of planetary change) inverts this: plastic polymers, synthetic chemicals, radioactive waste outlast almost everything we deliberately try to preserve. Our trash is more durable than our monuments. The half-life of plutonium-239 is 24,000 years. The persistence of that artefact mocks the idea of geological time as a great eraser of things humans once made. 

What potentials arise in the context of literary criticism in these overheated times of climate change? Which texts and traditions help us to confront, critique, and thrive under conditions of decay? What survives of literature and literary critique in the Anthropocene? 

We will have an opportunity to engage with such defining questions of our time through literary texts, films, archives, and exhibitions at UMass Amherst.

English 497B Special Topics: Writing and Activism (400 elective)(WRLS)

Lecture 1    Meeting TBA        Instructor: Rebecca Dingo
Writing and Activism.  Democracy is not only a political system, it is a rhetorical practice. This course examines how writing, speech, and activism shape democratic life in the United States and across global contexts. A central component of the course is the slow reading of Celeste Ng’s novel Our Missing Hearts. Through deliberate, reflective engagement with this narrative, students will examine how authoritarianism takes root through language, how dissent is rhetorically suppressed, and how individuals and communities use storytelling, art, and voice as acts of resistance. Slow reading will help students practice skills for democratic participation including attentive listening, critical interpretation, and ethical engagement. Using Ng’s novel as a touchpoint throughout the semester, students will investigate how democratic discourse is strengthened or undermined by forces such as disinformation, polarization, inequality, colonial legacies, and the erosion of civic trust. Drawing on case studies, literature, policies, and activist practices, the course explores how citizens use rhetoric to deliberate, protest, organize, and imagine more just futures. Students will analyze activist traditions, study how language structures power, and compare democratic challenges and responses across national contexts. The course positions the classroom as a rehearsal space for democratic engagement, emphasizing creative rhetorical strategies, and activist practices for sustaining civic life. Students will develop their abilities to write, listen, argue, and advocate across difference as they consider how rhetorical action can both fracture and repair democracy.

English 499C Foundations and Departures in Creative Writing: Fiction, Poetry and Literary Nonfiction (400 creative writing elective)

Lecture 1    MW 4:00-5:15    Instructor: John Hennessy
Foundations and Departures in Creative Writing: Fiction, Poetry, and Literary Non-Fiction is  a multi-genre, two-semester course in creative writing designed to help students complete a Capstone project within the genre of their choice. Both a class in contemporary literature and a writing workshop, Foundations and Departures will offer students a wide variety of reading assignments and writing exercises from across all three genres. At the end of the first semester students will submit a portfolio of original work; in the second semester students will finish drafting and revising their Capstone projects. Textbooks will include The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, collections of poetry by Nathan McClain and Denise Duhamel, an anthology of contemporary short stories, and non-fiction by Ta-Nehisi Coates and others.

Interested students should submit a personal statement: 1-2 pages, list and briefly discuss your favorite books, writers, poems, poets, etc.; also, tell me if you are a student in Commonwealth College—some priority will be given to ComColl students, but some of the most successful students in 499 in past years have come from outside Commonwealth College. Also include a writing sample—one complete story or essay, or 5-10 poems. Some combination of poetry and prose is also permitted. SEND TO: [email protected] by APRIL 26.
 

The University Without Walls (UWW) at UMass Amherst offers online courses and degree programs. For students taking classes on campus, you will need to request an enrollment appointment on Spire before you can enroll in UWW courses. To learn more about UWW and the online degree programs they offer, visit their website.

Summer 2026 English Online Courses

Summer Session One:

English 115 American Experience
(GenEd: AL, DU)
Instructor: Alejandro Beas Murillo
Puerto Rican Narratives of Migration, Exile, and Return 

In this course, we will engage with texts that portray Puerto Rican people’s experiences of exile from the archipelago, migration to the United States, and the possibility and impossibility of return. We will pay attention both to the literature and art produced in the Puerto Rican archipelago as well as to its Diaspora in areas like New York, New England, the Midwest, and Florida. Although our main focus will be to study how Puerto Rican writers and artists have represented the experience of leaving and/or returning to the archipelago, we will also pay attention to how they have wrestled with the notion of Puerto Ricanness. In doing so, we will see how these authors have exposed the heteropatriarchal and white supremacist logic at the heart of many of Puerto Rico’s national myths and canonical texts. Together, we will ask: How do artists in the archipelago and the Diaspora understand Puerto Rican identity differently? How do Afro-Puerto Rican, queer, and women writers critique the constant erasure of Black, queer, and feminist histories and perspectives from the history of the archipelago? How do these authors portray the entanglements between belonging, citizenship, and colonialism? (ALDU)  (Gen.Ed. AL, DU)

English 221 Shakespeare 
(early British literature or 200 elective)(GenEd: AL)
Instructor: Olivia Barry 

Shakespeare’s Tyrants. This course will introduce students to Shakespeare’s dramatic art and poetic style through a representative selection of plays that stage power, tyranny, and resistance. Questions this class will pose include: Where do we see forces of tyranny operating in Shakespeare’s plays? How do different sites of tyranny in the texts allow us to interrogate histories of nation-building, race-making, and gender? How does Shakespeare use genre conventions to unsettle or reinscribe governmental power? and What can dramatic accounts of tyranny and injustice teach us about resistance today? Through writing assignments, creative projects, and lectures, students will learn to parse Shakespeare’s language, practice close reading and analysis, and imagine Shakespeare’s plays as they might be staged in theatrical performances.This course will be delivered entirely online. All lectures will be pre-recorded, and synchronous discussion activities will be optional, available at the students’ discretion.  (Gen.Ed. AL)

English 254: Introduction to Creative Writing 
(intro to creative writing concentration/specialization or 200 English elective)
Instructor: Haley Harris
Topic: Writing the Natural World  

Introduction to Creative Writing is a multi-genre creative writing course that introduces students to the practice of writing, analyzing, and critiquing fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Students will analyze problems of form and elements of genre and study varying stylistic approaches and techniques. Using the natural world as our entrypoint,  this course will meditate on landscape, flora, and fauna as an extension of writer, body, and cosmos. We will traverse the natural landscapes of our own memories, minds, and dreams alongside assigned selections of botanical writing. Embodied writing assignments, rituals, and practices will give students the opportunity to experiment and hone their own voices and styles. ENGL 254 is a General Education course in the curriculum area Social World and the core designation Literature (AL), and it is also the entry class for the English Department’s Creative Writing Concentration (majors) and Specialization (non-majors).  

English 319AG Writing Comics
(300 creative writing elective)
Instructor: Stefan Petrucha

A nuts-and-bolts look at comic books and graphic novels purely from the writer's side. With 'Making Comics' by Scott McCloud as the basic text, we'll look at panel descriptions that inspire visuals, character-driven dialogue, the seven types of relationship between words and pictures, the writer/artist relationship and more. In addition to various writing exercises, students will develop their own ideas from springboards into completed scripts. This is not a course about artwork, and requires no artistic skill. It is also not a course about superheroes, treating graphic novel as an open medium capable of engaging any type of literary effort from genre to poetry.

Summer Session 2 Courses:

English 132 Gender, Sexuality, Literature & Culture
(GenEds: AL; DG)
Instructor: Rachel Smith Olson  

Introduction to literature through a lens of gender identity and sexuality.  Texts include fiction, plays, poems that deal with and inspire conversations about the public politics and personal experience of gender and sexuality, both in the past and present. (Gen.Ed. AL, DG)

English 150 Writing and Society
(GenEds: DU; SB)
Instructor: Oscar Garcia
This course aims to heighten your awareness of writing as both practice and concept. "Writing Studies" is an interdisciplinary area of study at the intersection of literacy studies, communication, digital studies, education, and linguistics that is interested in how written texts - public documents, technical and professional communication, social media, etc. - reflect and impact social organization and change. The course invites students to explore writing in society through a problem-posing approach, focusing attention on how writing is understood, used, and learned. (Gen. Ed. SB, DU)

English 202 Later British Literature
(British literature after 1700 or 200 level English elective)
Instructor: Meenakshi Nair    
The development of British literature from the Enlightenment of the 18th century through the Romaticism and Realism of the 19th century to the Modernism of the early 20th century; literary response to scientific and industrial changes, political revolution and the technical and social reordering of British society.  Open only to English majors, and those studying at the University on international or domestic exchange.

English 356 Creative Writing Poetry
(300 creative writing elective)
Instructor: Amelia Van Donsel
Poetics of Attention: Writing in a Busy World 
What do you wish you paid more attention to? Which parts of our day do we actually notice and remember? How can the smallest encounters, experiences, or objects move us to write? Our goal in this course is to investigate the simple practice of attention in our busy lives and its impact on our poetic work. We will explore how we can more selectively attend to our inner and outer worlds, and use this awareness as the first step in our creative process. Writing exercises throughout the summer will help us generate poems that are focused and surprising. Our asynchronous workshop space will celebrate each other’s poems, discuss our observations, and notice opportunities for revision. We will examine the work of contemporary poets like Eileen Myles, Solmaz Sharif, Rachel Zucker, Hanif Abdurraqib, Claudia Rankine, Rae Armantrout, and Ocean Vuong, who share a deep interest in what it means to lend attention. In addition to an understanding of how to bring the most mundane parts of our world into the light, students will leave the course with a portfolio of revised poems. All levels welcome. Note: ENG 254 Introduction to Creative Writing is a prerequisite for this course.

English 391AJ Writing for a Living
(300 creative writing elective)
Instructor: Stefan Petrucha
You want to be a professional writer, but now what? Learn strategies and skills for presenting your book, your articles, your ideas, and yourself to editors and agents in a compelling and competitive manner. With a focus on writing and critiquing Queries (a one-page pitch) we’ll explore the history and rapidly changing world of publishing, including  e-books, self-publishing and a special look at AI and Writing.

Winter 2026 English Online Courses

English 202 Later British Literature
(course in later British literature or 200 elective)
Instructor: Tyler Clark
Popular, Sensational, and Mass-Market Literature.

This course traces the development of the British “popular novel” from the 18th century until present day. As the novel developed as a widely circulated medium throughout Britain, various subgenres such as the Gothic or Sensation Fiction drove masses towards circulating libraries and serial print. Focusing on highly Popular fiction and “celebrity” authors, students will trace the origins of the Gothic novel, the Victorian three-volume novel, and Modernist romans à clef, as well as how these tropes shape the British novel today. Through critical readings of works by authors such as Jane Austen, Mary Seacole, Charlotte Bronte, E.F. Benson, and Helen Oyeyemi, this course investigates how popular fiction reflects social anxieties about gender, technological development, and race. Students will also read critical theorists such as Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to supplement their understanding of these social developments. 
 

English 254 Intro to Creative Writing
(creative writing)(200 English elective)
Instructor: Katia Bakhiyarova
The Ordinary World: Introduction to Creative Writing

What to write about? It’s a torture that no writer, seasoned or amateur, is exempt from. In this course, we will seek to answer this question by learning to pay special attention to the world around us. In doing so, we will learn that the basis for any great poem, story, or nonfiction creative essay can be found in the most ordinary of sources. A song you heard in the supermarket? That’s the soundtrack to your next poem. What about a conversation you overheard at lunch? That’s the first line of a new story. Writers can expect to receive a wide variety of writing prompts and a series of craft sessions oriented around fundamental principles such as point of view, plot development, structure, style, theme, and more. Writers will emerge with a practiced sense of writing across genre, an established writing routine, and a plethora of resources for publishing work.

English 339 Film and Literature
(300 English elective)
Instructor: Alejandro Beas Murillo
To Render a Black World: Contemporary Black Film and Fiction.

This course explores contemporary cinematic and literary representations of Black life, poesis, and worldmaking practices in North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Great Britain. Together, we will think through some of the following questions: How do these texts represent Black life, love, and joy while contending with the terror of antiblack, heteropatriarchal, and carceral violence? How do these texts make use of written and visual, cinematic language to represent Black worlds, bodies, and forms of knowledge? In some instances, we will compare film adaptations of famous texts written by authors such as Colson Whitehead and James Baldwin to explore the changes and continuities between the original literary source and its adaptation. As such, we will consider what is lost and gained in the transition from literary to cinematic representation. Other times, we will stage conversations between literary texts and films from different parts of the Black Diaspora; we will, for example, compare how Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat and French-Senegalese director Mati Diop represent the entanglements between colonialism, migration, and gender, or how motherhood, family, and sexuality are represented by authors Gwendolyn Brooks and Jamaica Kincaid and in short films by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich and Raven Jackson.

English 355 Creative Writing Fiction
(creative writing)(300 creative writing/English elective)
Instructor: Vika Mujumdar
WRITING INTO PLACE

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image,” writes Joan Didion in her essay collection The White Album. Taking this idea as our point of departure, how might we write into place? How do we make our fiction belong to a place? How do we understand our own belonging(s) to place and geography? This advanced fiction workshop considers the relationship between literature and place; we will read excerpts from writers including Dur e Aziz Amna, Elena Ferrante, Sabina Murray, Aria Aber, Chris Knapp, Jung Yun, and others to consider how writing place creates aftereffects that echo far after a book is published. Alongside reading craft essays and criticism, we will think through the relationships between geography and literature—how does intertextuality function in relation to place? What webs and networks, historical and temporal, are created through writing a place? Students will write and workshop two short stories during the semester.

English 391AJ Writing for a Living
(300 creative writing elective)
Instructor: Stefan Petrucha

You want to be a professional writer, but now what? Learn strategies and skills for presenting your book, your articles, your ideas, and yourself to editors and agents in a compelling and competitive manner. With a focus on writing and critiquing Queries (a one-page pitch) we’ll explore the history and rapidly changing world of publishing, including  e-books, self-publishing and a special look at AI and Writing.

Fall 2025 English Online Courses

English 132 Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Culture
(GenEd: ALDG)
Instructor: Sarah Ahmad

In this course, we will study a range of texts and media to explore space (imagined and real) and text as sites where power is imposed as well as challenged. This premise arises from the tradition of feminist and queer utopias, asking us to think about how racial, gendered, and colonial projects are enacted and countered in literary representations of space - landscapes, borders, cities, houses, streets. How do differently-minoritized subjects write – and read – places that are ‘useless’ (such as a text) as places of survival and meaning-making?  We will work together to floor-plan the texts we encounter, paying attention to their historical contexts and their techniques of reimagining and inhabiting the world. 

English 319AG Writing Comics
(300 creative writing elective)
Instructor: Stefan Petrucha

A nuts-and-bolts look at comic books and graphic novels purely from the writer's side. With 'Making Comics' by Scott McCloud as the basic text, we'll look at panel descriptions that inspire visuals, character-driven dialogue, the seven types of relationship between words and pictures, the writer/artist relationship and more. In addition to various writing exercises, students will develop their own ideas from springboards into completed scripts. This is not a course about artwork, and requires no artistic skill. It is also not a course about superheroes, treating graphic novel as an open medium capable of engaging any type of literary effort from genre to poetry.

English 391AJ Writing for a Living
(300 creative writing elective)
Instructor: Stefan Petrucha

You want to be a professional writer, but now what? Learn strategies and skills for presenting your book, your articles, your ideas, and yourself to editors and agents in a compelling and competitive manner. With a focus on writing and critiquing Queries (a one-page pitch) we’ll explore the history and rapidly changing world of publishing, including  e-books, self-publishing and a special look at AI and Writing.

Summer Session 2026 Courses

English 131 Society and Literature
Writing the Queer/Trans Self
Instructor: Sam Davis 

How do queer and trans authors negotiate the written self amidst a culture which seeks to erase trans and non-binary realities, selves, and identities? In this class we will explore a handful of contemporary American literary texts written by queer and trans authors to explore how language is used, challenged, rejected, and reclaimed to constitute new literary selves and possibilities. For example, we will explore the reclamation of they/them pronouns, and the ways in which non-binary selves write themselves into binary colonial languages. The class will engage fundamental scholarship on race, gender, disability, and culture within the field of Trans studies.  (GenEds: ALDG)

U+ Summer 2025, Session 1 [May 19 - July 1]

English 254: Intro to Creative Writing
Writing as Practice
Instructor: Nathaniel Pinkham

How do I start writing? How do I keep it going? How do I end it?

These are the essential questions that we will explore through the semester. This class will be about the process of writing, how deliberate practice improves our ability to create gripping sentences, write intricate narratives, and form a compelling work. We will read across all genres, including fiction from Madeline ffitch and Haruki Murakami, poetry from Ocean Vuong and James Skyler, as well as creative nonfiction from David Foster Wallace and Joan Didion.

Through a workshop environment and collaboration with our peers, we will seek to make a community of writers that can engage with each other’s work openly and honestly. By the end of our time together, students will leave with a portfolio of five poems, two stories, and two nonfiction or hybrid texts, as well as narrative fragments that could become future stories, novels, poems, or works of creative nonfiction. More than anything, this course aims to encourage a writing habit that works for you, one that will help you inside this course and beyond it.

U+ Summer 2025, Session 2 [ July 7 - August 15]

English 132 Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Society
Contemporary Feminist Literature in Latin America and the Caribbean
Instructor: Alejandro Beas Murillo

This course examines literary responses to and representations of the contemporary feminist movements across the Caribbean and Latin America, whose cry for freedom and justice is best captured in the sentence “Ni una más” (“Not one more”). We will take the mid-1980s as our starting point and end by speculating on what the future of the Latin American and Caribbean feminist movements might offer in the face of ever-rising fascism, US and European interventionism, and the increased policing and violence against women and queer people that these entail.

Through literature, films and documentaries, and music, we will explore the struggle for abortion rights, the contributions of women writers and activists in the fight against colonial governments and dictatorships, the demands for social and state recognition, reparations, and protection against all forms of violence against women, and the disruption of race, gender, sexual, and familial roles. The authors we will discuss also interrogate the white supremacist and trans-exclusionary rhetorics of the Western feminist movements and find alternative models of feminism that can satisfy the needs and experiences of Black, Indigenous, and trans women. Together, we will think through the following questions: Why do Caribbean and Latin American women writers turn to magical realism, the gothic genre, the family saga, and the memoir to talk about violence against women? How do contemporary Caribbean and Latin American women writers portray and influence emancipatory movements throughout the region? What are the possibilities and alternative worlds that these texts envision and how can they be fulfilled? In a Caribbean and Latin American literary canon that has been historically dominated by men, how are women writers disordering and reinventing the literature of their regions? (Gen.Ed. AL, DG)

U+ Summer 2025, Session 2 [ July 7 - August 15]

English 190N Nature, Climate Change and Literature 
Instructor: Raihan Rahman

This course introduces you to the interdisciplinary field of the Environmental Humanities, which engages with the relationship between humanistic study and environmental concerns. You will be introduced to a range of literary, artistic, historical, and popular narratives from across the globe that interrogate the questions of nature/culture, environment, climate change, species extinction, and the Anthropocene. You will learn how categories of class, gender, race, and ethnicity and structures of domination like capitalism and imperialism complicate our understanding of those questions. You will read novels, poems, short stories, non-fictions and watch films and documentaries to explore the relationship between capital, empire, and climate change and to imagine alternative political possibilities for building emancipatory and flourishing futures.

U+ Summer 2025, Session 2 [ July 7 - August 15]

English 202 Later British Literature 
Reading the Desires and Anxieties of the Long 19th Century
(British literature after 1700)
Instructor: Helin Park

Bath's elegant ballrooms, Liverpool's bustling train stations, a chemical-smelling London flat, and the shadowy chambers of a country manor—who inhabits these spaces, and how are they connected? What happens within them, and what do these scenes reveal about a rapidly changing society?

The late 18th and 19th centuries marked Britain's global dominance, and seemingly separate spheres -- domestic and public, rural and urban, island and continent, traditional and modern, colony and empire -- became intricately interwoven. As industrialization, urban expansion, new technologies, and foreign objects were blended into daily life and social relations, literature captured the expectations, tensions, and anxieties of the time. With this context in mind, we will read works that explore them while featuring heroines who are naive, hysterical, or cunning about these changes. Whether driving the plot or serving as readers themselves, they offer insight into gender expectations, consumption, knowledge, reality, and detection.

Throughout the course, key themes will be: social class and mobility, appearance versus reality, domesticity and imperialism, and how women negotiated their place within—and against—the shifting forces of modern life. Readings will include both canonical authors and once-beloved Victorian writers now largely forgotten. Ultimately, we will ask how novels, or literature in a larger sense, offer not only entertainment but a way to learn, understand, and navigate the social reality of the modern world.

U+ Summer 2025, Session 2 [ July 7 - August 15]

English 356 : Creative Writing Poetry
Poetics of Space
Instructor: Lena Rubin

To locate oneself in space is a politically charged act, a practice against alienation and towards connection with the plants, animals, humans, buildings, relationships, communities, and weathers that populate the real landscapes in which we find ourselves writing. It’s also an aesthetic challenge. How can sunlight, summer air, the moon, a river, a city, or a room be reflected or refracted through a poem? In this course, we will look closely and listen deeply to the spaces that speak to us. A spirit of experimentation and play will guide us, alongside close reading of poets like Amiri Baraka, Basho, Anne Carson, Lisa Robertson, Joanne Kyger, and Gary Snyder. Taking inspiration from Lisa Robertson’s notion that “the movements of cities [are] echoed in the movements of bodies,” this course aims to foster a deeper sense of reciprocity between self and environment. This course helps you sharpen your skills at poetry craft and work toward completion of one or two poems. This asynchronous course will include lectures, writing exercises, and workshopping of student projects (each student presenting work two times).

U+ Summer 2025, Session 2 [ July 7 - August 15]

English 391AJ Writing for a Living
(300 creative writing elective)
Instructor: Stefan Petrucha

You want to be a professional writer, but now what? Learn strategies and skills for presenting your book, your articles, your ideas, and yourself to editors and agents in a compelling and competitive manner. With a focus on writing and critiquing Queries (a one-page pitch) we’ll explore the history and rapidly changing world of publishing, including  e-books, self-publishing and a special look at AI and Writing.

Fall 2026 courses organized by requirements in the major that they meet.

English 200 Intro to Literary Studies

English 200, Section 1
English 200, Section 2
English 200, Section 3
English 200, Section 4 

One course in British Literature and Culture before 1700

English 201 Early British Literature
English 221 Shakespeare 
English 313 Intro to Old English Poetry
 

Survey Requirements (total 2 courses)

Two courses total: One course each in two of the following categories:

• Category 1: British Literature and Culture after 1700

• Category 2: American Literature and Culture before 1865

• Category 3: American Literature and Culture after 1865

English 202 Later British Literature (category 1)
English 268 American Literature and Culture before 1865 (category 2)
English 269 American Literature and Culture after 1865 (category 3)
English 300 Junior Year Writing, Sect 1: Resistance & Revolution in 20th and 21st Century American Poetry (category 3)
English 358 The Romantic Poets (category 1)
English 359 Victorian Imagination (category 1)
English 366 Modern Poetry (category 3)

One course in global Anglophone or ethnic American literature, culture, or rhetorics 200+ level:

English 204 Intro to Asian American literature
English 365 Literature of Ireland
English 468 James Joyce

200-400+ English electives:

English 201 Early British Literature
English 202 Later British Literature
English 204 Intro to Asian American literature 
English 221 Shakespeare
English 254 Intro to Creative Writing (4 sections)
English 268 American Literature and Culture before 1865
English 269 American Literature and Culture after 1865 
English 300 Junior Year Writing, Section 1: Resistance & Revolution in 20th and 21st Century American Poetry
English 300 Junior Year Writing: Section 2: TBA
English 300H Junior Year Writing honors, Section 3: Beckett Across the Arts
English 313 Intro to Old English Poetry
English 319 Representing the Holocaust
English 329H Tutoring Writing:  Theory and Practice Honors
English 350H Expository Writing Honors
English 355 Creative Writing Fiction (2 sections)
English 356 Creative Writing Poetry
English 358 The Romantic Poets 
English 359 Victorian Imagination
English 365 Literature of Ireland
English 366 Modern Poetry
English 385 Creative Nonfiction
English 359 Victorian Imagination
English 379 Intro to Professional Writing (2 sections)
English 380 Professional Writing and Technical Communication
English 388 Rhetoric, Writing & Society
English 450 Advanced Expository Writing
English 455 Creative Writing: Fiction
English 456 Creative Writing: Poetry
English 468 James Joyce
English 491UX UX for Writers
English 499C Honors Thesis: Foundations and Departures in Creative Writing: Fiction, Poetry and Literary Non-fiction.
 

Students may count English 398 (a graded, 3-credit internship) towards this requirement.

Junior Year Writing:

English 300 Junior Year Writing, Section 1: Resistance & Revolution in 20th and 21st Century American Poetry
English 300 Junior Year Writing: Section 2: TBA
English 300H Junior Year Writing honors, Section 3: Beckett Across the Arts

Second majors in English are not required to fulfill their junior year writing or integrative experience requirements in English as they will fulfill them in their primary major.

Integrative Experience:

English 494EI Writing, Identity & English Studies
English 494NI The Next Chapter, section 1 Sub-title: Interactive Fiction
English 494NI The Next Chapter, section 2 Sub-title: Artefacts in the Anthropocene

Second majors in English are not required to fulfill their junior year writing or integrative experience requirements in English as they will fulfill them in their primary major.

Important Notes:

If you wish to apply 1 course toward 2 approved requirements, you must pick up 1 extra 300+ English elective and notify the English Undergraduate Office so that we can make the exception on your ARR. For instance, if you would like to count English 300 Junior Year Writing, Section 5 US Literature in a Global Context toward both the American literature before 1865 requirement and also toward Junior Year Writing, you must take one extra 300+ English elective. It can be a writing or literature course.

Dual degree candidates 2nd majors must take junior year writing with us (but are still waived from the Integrative Experience)

We accept no more than three pre-approved transfer, exchange and/or five college courses toward our major requirements.

Contact:

Please contact Celeste ([email protected]) at the English Undergraduate office if you have any questions about the requirements or to get elective credit for an internship and/or transfer courses pre-approved.

Fall 2026 Courses sorted by specializations and certificate programs

American Studies

English 300 Junior Year Writing, Section 1: Resistance and Revolution in 20th & 21st Century American Poetry

Creative Writing

English 254 Intro to Creative Writing (4 sections)
English 350H Expository Writing Honors
English 355 Creative Writing Fiction
English 356 Creative Writing Poetry 
English 391P Literary Editing, Programming & Publishing
English 450 Advanced Expository Writing
English 455 Creative Writing: Fiction
English 456 Creative Writing: Poetry

Environmental Humanities

English 365 Literature of Ireland
English 494NI Next Chapter, Section 2: Artefacts in the Anthropocene

Literature as History

English 221 Shakespeare
English 300 Junior Year Writing, Section 1: Resistance and Revolution in 20th & 21st Century American Poetry
English 359 Victorian Imagination

Social Justice

English 221 Shakespeare
English 300 Junior Year Writing, Section 1: Resistance and Revolution in 20th & 21st Century American Poetry
English 386 Studies in Writing & Culture: Feminist Writing Practices
English 491Z Poetry of the Political Imagination

Teaching The English Language Arts (TELA)

English 250 Intro to Writing, Rhetoric and Literacy Studies
English 329H Tutoring Writing: Theory & Practice
English 388 Rhetoric, Writing & Society 

Writing, Rhetoric and Literacy Studies

English 250 Intro to Writing, Rhetoric and Literacy Studies
English 302 Studies in Textuality & New Media
English 329H Tutoring Writing: Theory & Practice
English 350H Expository Writing Honors
English 379 Intro to Professional Writing
English 380 Professional Writing and Technical Communication
English 386 Studies in Writing & Culture: Feminist Writing Practices
English 389 The Major and Beyond
English 391P Literary Editing, Programming & Publishing
English 491UX UX for Writers
English 497B Writing & Activism: How writing, speech, and activism shape democratic life

Professional Writing and Technical Communication Certificate Program

(open only to juniors and seniors with a GPA of a 3.0 or higher)

English 379 Intro to Professional Writing
English 380 Professional Writing and Technical Communication