ENGL 5709a / AMST 6609a, Introduction to Early American Studies  Greta LaFleur

This seminar offers a graduate-level introduction to early American studies, an interdisciplinary field that combines historical, literary, geographic, scientific, cultural and religious studies scholarship to understand the cultural and political landscapes of “early America.” The course combines both historical accounts of the field and field formation but also explores important critiques by historians of Native America and historians of slavery of the evolution of the field and its prerogatives; indeed, depending on who you ask, “early America” describes an era between the start of the Paleo-Indian period (15,000 BCE) and 1900, and standard definitions of “early America,” as the saying goes, are only “early” to settlers. This course is bookended by a hard stop in the 1830s and begins in the early colonial period with Native histories. Early America is, as the Omohundro Center bills it, quite vast, so this course in no way claims to offer a regionally, historically, or topically comprehensive account of the field. Instead, it seeks to introduce students to key histories, subfields, scholarly conversations and questions of field formation that provide a foundation for students who plan to engage early American studies scholarship in later work. Topics include the multilayered colonial histories (French, Spanish, British, Comanche) of various regions of North America; cultures of labor and racialization; histories of slavery; histories of encounter, trade, war, and genocide between colonial entities and Native nations, from the northeast through the southwest; the sedimentation of British colonial control of the east coast and the development of colonial and later state and federal governance; histories of culturally-specific forms of gendered and sexual expression; and histories of scientific thought. 
M 1:30pm-3:25pm

ENGL 5746a / CPLT 6046a / EMST 5460a / GMAN 6046a, Rise of the European Novel  Katie Trumpener and Rudiger Campe

In the eighteenth century, the novel became a popular literary form in many parts of Europe. Yet now-standard narratives of its “rise” often offer a temporally and linguistically foreshortened view. This seminar examines key early modern novels in a range of European languages, centered on the dialogue between highly influential eighteenth-century British and French novels (Montesquieu, Defoe, Sterne, Diderot, Laclos, Edgeworth). We begin by considering a sixteenth-century Spanish picaresque life history (Lazarillo de Tormes) and Madame de Lafayette’s seventeenth-century secret history of French court intrigue; contemplate a key sentimental Goethe novella; and end with Romantic fiction (an Austen novel, a Kleist novella, Pushkin’s historical novel fragment). These works raise important issues about cultural identity and historical experience, the status of women (including as readers and writers), the nature of society, the vicissitudes of knowledge—and novelistic form. We also examine several major literary-historical accounts of the novel’s generic evolution, audiences, timing, and social function, and historiographical debates about the novel’s rise (contrasting English-language accounts stressing the novel’s putatively British genesis, and alternative accounts sketching a larger European perspective). The course gives special emphasis to the improvisatory, experimental character of early modern novels, as they work to reground fiction in the details and reality of contemporary life. Many epistolary, philosophical, sentimental, and Gothic novels present themselves as collections of “documents”—letters, diaries, travelogues, confessions—carefully assembled, impartially edited, and only incidentally conveying stories as well as information. The seminar explores these novels’ documentary ambitions; their attempt to touch, challenge, and change their readers; and their paradoxical influence on “realist” conventions (from the emergence of omniscient, impersonal narrators to techniques for describing time and place).
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

ENGL 5847a / AMST 7791a / BLST 9347a, Black Existentialisms  Shane Vogel

This course is an introduction to Black existential thought as it developed in the writing of African American and Afro-Caribbean authors. Existentialism typically describes a historical movement in philosophy and culture associated with mid-twentieth-century European intellectuals that asked how individuals constitute themselves within and beyond the given constraints and possibilities of their situation. But a deep tradition of Africana philosophies of existence—Black existentialism—are related to yet distinct from this European tradition. Throughout the course we explore key existential concepts such as freedom, liberation, authenticity, responsibility, action, situation, anguish, dwelling, the gaze, and the Other as they have been imagined in Black diasporic expressive cultures. Questions we will ask include: How have Black writers developed existential ideas in novels, poetry, and drama? How does the mid-century encounter between European and Africana existentialisms animate the literature of Black freedom struggles in the US and across the colonial and postcolonial world? How does Black existentialism understand the (im)possibility of self-making within societies structured in dominance, and what might an existentialist understanding of Black collectivity look like? How can Black existential thought provide productive opportunities to reevaluate some of the dialectics that have shaped conversations in Black studies such as hope/despair, being/nonbeing, humanism/antihumanism, and social life/social death? Readings may include work by Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Lewis R. Gordon, Nathalie Étoke, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Henry Paget, Angela Davis, Richard Wright, Adrienne Kennedy, Jesmyn Ward, Ann Petry, William Melvin Kelley, George Lamming, Sam Selvon, Toni Morrison, and others. This is an introductory-level seminar, and no previous knowledge of the course content is expected.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

ENGL 6173b / CPLT 6173b, The Canon in the Colony: How Literature Made The British Empire  Priyasha Mukhopadhyay

This course explores the colonial and postcolonial life of the English literary canon from the nineteenth century to the present. The “canon” wasn’t merely a cultural export that bolstered the global project of colonialism. It was just as often ignored, interrogated, and appropriated by local readers across the Anglophone world. Taking this as a starting point, this course has four main aims: (1) to examine the theoretical underpinnings of canon formation: what is the canon, and what institutional and cultural forces go into its making? (2) to interrogate the link between literature and national culture and consider the role that the canon played in propagating notions of “Englishness” in the colonial and postcolonial worlds (3) to think about how reading choices and practices invite us to rethink questions of power, dominance, and agency (4) to introduce students to ways of measuring reader responses, both qualitative and quantitative. Starting with the nineteenth century, we look at some early legislative attempts to put the canon in the service of colonialism. We move on to traces of colonial readers—both compliant and resistant—in the archive. The course then turns to English authors who have had a particularly colourful afterlife outside England. We go on to study postcolonial theories of “writing back” and the reinvention of the canon, and end with a discussion of the place of the canon in literary culture today. Our discussions are informed by a range of literary texts, theoretical essays, publishing records, colonial textbooks, book reviews, and films from across the colonial and postcolonial world.
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

ENGL 6500b / LING 5000b / MDVL 5700b, Old English  Emily Thornbury

The essentials of the language, some prose readings, and close study of several celebrated Old English poems.
MW 11:35am-12:50pm

ENGL 6525a / FREN 8150a / ITAL 8550a, Medieval Lyric  Ardis Butterfield and Heather Webb

Medieval lyric is famously mobile, whether we consider the ways it was composed and performed, or the ways in which it was transcribed or recorded, or the paths it took around the Mediterranean. This course explores the trajectories of medieval lyrics from a variety of perspectives. We journey from Al-Andalus to Occitania, to Sicily, to Tuscany, to Umbria, to Paris, to Calais, and across the Channel to East Anglia and London. Authors include Arnaut Daniel, Thibaut de Navarre, Gace Brulé, Jean Renart, Adam de la Halle, Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Jacopone da Todi, Giacomo da Lentini, Machaut, Deschamps, and many anonymous and understudied, but inventive English songs and short poems. Focusing on a selection of lyrics each week (with translations provided where appropriate), we range widely through such topics as the idea of voice, the relation between lyric and narrative, poetry and music, and song and translation, guided by the central issues of place, encounter, and (often gendered) power dynamics. Key questions include: Is there a theory of lyric in the Middle Ages? What can contemporary thinking and writing about lyric teach us about verse surviving from 600–800 years ago? What can medieval lyric contribute to contemporary debates about lyric? Our materials include lyrics that were recorded not only on parchment and paper but also on walls and in stained glass, on tombs, in tapestries, and on domestic objects, clothing, drinking cups, and rings. Through manuscripts, objects, words, images, and music we aim to uncover a sense of the inventive freedom at work in the lyric forms of the past.
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

ENGL 6631a / CPLT 6631a / EMST 5631a, Neoplatonism Across Time and Faith  Feisal Mohamed

In his 2024 book on mysticism, Simon Critchley points to it as a form of human experience allowing us to “push outside the sticky self towards something larger, something vaster, something full of vibrancy and maybe a sheer, mad joy at the fact of life and the world.” The Neoplatonic tradition provides a philosophical foundation for that experience, a foundation common to mystical writings in all three Abrahamic traditions. The wellspring of Christian mysticism is the Syrian monk Pseudo-Dionysius, who was clearly an attentive student of Proclus; Neoplatonism is at the core of the Islamic tradition of falsafa and of the mystic-poet Ibn ’Arabi; such poets as Solomon ibn Gabirol reveal the currency of Neoplatonic thought in Jewish Andalusía; and the early modern period witnesses another resurgence of interest in Neoplatonism, Christian and Jewish, as in the thought of Marsilio Ficino and Judah Leon Abravanel. Exploring this vast influence allows us to engage in a profound remapping of cultural and intellectual traditions—classical, medieval, early modern, and modern—less centered on Athens and Rome and taking into its ken Alexandria, Damascus, and Baghdad. Plotinus really gets around, and following his travels can shed new light on familiar texts from late antiquity to the Modernist moment. To study the Neoplatonic tradition is to take an intellectual journey to a distant planet, only to discover upon arrival that it is the home one has always known, now seen with new eyes. The Neoplatonists are rivaled only by Aristotle in their ability to cross time and culture. And yet they are widely neglected in the Anglo-American university. While devoting significant attention to the resurgence of interest in Neoplatonism in early modernity, this course spans periods and disciplines to make visible a ubiquitous tradition hiding in plain sight.
T 9:25am-11:20am

ENGL 6720b, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire  David Bromwich and Anthony Kronman

Close reading an interpretation of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. We discuss the passage from republic to empire, drawing also on classical historians of Rome and Enlightenment commentators.
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm

ENGL 6768a / CPLT 5970a / HSAR 6768a, The Birth of Aesthetics  Jonathan Kramnick

This is a course on the emergence of aesthetic theory in Enlightenment and Romantic era Europe. We'll examine how a new language of art and nature focused on the experience of the beholder and track evolving categories of the sublime, beautiful, and picturesque in key texts of philosophy and literature. We'll connect ideas of aesthetic judgment and autonomy to central institutions and ideologies of the modern era, including the public sphere, secularism, the private subject, racial capitalism, and the market. Readings begin with empirical philosophies of perception and early accounts of the aesthetic in Locke, Addison, Hutcheson, Pope, Hume, and Burke and continue through the watershed moment of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Kant, and Schiller. The seminar ends with a consideration of aesthetic theory in the long contemporary period of Adorno, Scarry, Rancière, and Ngai. Previously ENGL 768.
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm

ENGL 6775b / HSAR 6678b, Portraiture and Character from Hogarth to Woolf  Ruth Yeazell

Case studies in the visual and verbal representation of persons in Anglo-American painting and fiction, with particular attention to novels that themselves include portraits or address relations between the two media. Novelists tentatively include Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf. Painters include William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Lawrence, James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, and Vanessa Bell. Selected readings in recent theories of fictional character and in the history and theory of portraiture. Whenever possible, we draw on paintings in Yale’s collections.
M 1:30pm-3:25pm

ENGL 6803b, Twenty-First Century Poetry and Poetics  Langdon Hammer

Late twentieth-century American poetry was dominated by an opposition between romantic and experimental, or lyric and anti-lyric, poetics. In the twenty-first century, that opposition has collapsed, generating new possibilities for the art. This course explores the contemporary landscape by discussing books of poetry alongside essays in poetics and literary theory. We are interested in how poems theorize themselves and in the tropological and formal dimensions of theory and criticism and the genre of the lyric essay. Our focus is primarily on US poetry, but this is an era in which US poetry understands itself in a global frame. Contexts include the 2008 financial crisis, Black Lives Matter, migration, and ecological disaster. We think about poetry and world literature, documentary poetics, poetry as notation, information technologies, and the poetics of the archive. Poets include Louise Glück, Reginald Shepherd, Claudia Rankine, Don Mee Choi, Srikanth Reddy, Wong May, Ben Lerner, Jorie Graham, Robyn Schiff, Maureen N. McLane, and Susan Howe. Readings by Lauren Berlant, Virginia Jackson, Jonathan Culler, Jahan Ramazani, Christopher Nealon, and others.
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm

ENGL 6814a, Literary Geopolitics  Joe Cleary

Combining literary and theoretical readings, we consider a variety of approaches to the issue of literary geopolitics. The seminar examines how some major works of twentieth-century literature configure geopolitical issues at the level of form, assess how literary capital is globally distributed, and discuss the establishment of national, postcolonial and “world literature” as fields of study. Literary authors may include Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Roth, Marguerite Duras, and Mathias Enard. Theoretical readings include works by Pascale Casanova, Pierre Bourdieu, Theo D’haen, Christopher GoGwilt, Franco Moretti, Edward Said, and others.
W 4pm-5:55pm

ENGL 6873a / FILM 9730a, Modernity and the Time of Literature  John Williams

This course examines transformations in temporality that occurred in the sciences and arts during the twentieth century. From the arrival of Einsteinian relativity to more contemporary proofs on quantum nonlocality, the question of time in the twentieth century threatened to overturn some of our oldest assumptions about cause and effect, duration, history, presentness, and futurity. These new temporalities were as scientifically and philosophically vexing as they were rife with spiritual and aesthetic possibility—a dynamic reflected in the literary and artistic forms that were central to these transformations. Our reading reflects this deeply cross-cultural and interdisciplinary trajectory, including histories of science and technology (Peter Galison, N. Katherine Hayles, David Kaiser), philosophies of time (Heidegger, Bruno Latour, Bernard Stiegler, McLuhan, Luhmann), critical theories of temporal form (Derrida, Adorno, Jameson, Pamela Lee, Kojin Karatani), a wide array of literary texts (William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Ursula K. Le Guin, Tom McCarthy, and others), as well as important cinematic innovations (Jodorowsky, Godard, Kubrick). What is the “time” of literature? of film? How does art transform or reinforce theories of temporal flow? How do new technologies of composition and circulation alter the temporal effects of a given work? What was the “End of History”? Previously ENGL 973.
M 7pm-8:55pm

ENGL 9090b, The Teaching of English  Anastasia Eccles and Heather Klemann

An introduction to the teaching of literature and of writing with attention to the history of the profession and to current issues in higher education such as the corporatization of the university, the role of the state in higher education, and the precarity of the humanities at the present time. Weekly seminars address a series of issues about teaching: guiding classroom discussion; introducing students to various literary genres; addressing race, class, and gender in the teaching of literature; formulating aims and assignments; grading and commenting on written work; lecturing and serving as a teaching assistant; preparing syllabuses and lesson plans. Formerly ENGL 990.
HTBA

ENGL 9091a, Public Criticism Workshop  Joanna Biggs

A workshop in which graduate students develop their critical writing about literature and culture for nonspecialist audiences. We survey writing for diverse publics in a range of venues in order to explore the formal and intellectual possibilities of criticism today, as well as in the recent past. Students experiment in forms such as the book review, long-form essay, lyric essay, and profile. Questions discussed include how to convey specialized knowledge to a broad audience; how to establish and manage style, voice, and address; how to combine criticism and reporting or narrative; how magazine editors select and develop the writing they publish; how to edit writing for publication; how to pitch a piece. We host class visits from editors and writers. Applications, including a short writing sample and short personal statement describing the student’s interest in public writing, are reviewed in fall 2026 for participation in the spring 2027 workshop.
M 4pm-5:55pm

ENGL 9092a, Advanced Pedagogy  Heather Klemann

Training for graduate students teaching introductory expository writing. Students plan a course of their own design on a topic of their own choosing, and they then put theories of writing instruction into practice by teaching a writing seminar. Prerequisite: open only to graduate students teaching ENGL 1014.
HTBA

ENGL 9094a, Prospectus Workshop  Nancy Yousef

Second term of a workshop in which students develop, draft, revise, and present their dissertation prospectuses, open to all third-year Ph.D. students in English.
W 11am-1pm

ENGL 9095a or b, Directed Reading  Staff

Designed to help fill gaps in students’ programs when there are corresponding gaps in the department’s offerings. By arrangement with faculty and with the approval of the DGS.
HTBA

ENGL 9096b, Publication Workshop  Joan Lubin

A workshop for graduate students revising a seminar paper, dissertation chapter, or other draft for publication in an academic journal. Topics of discussion include the genres and forms of critical writing; mechanics and diplomacy of peer review; techniques and ethics of citation; and how to be a helpful reader of others’ work in progress. Depending on student interest, we may also discuss and/or workshop critical writing for public-facing venues beyond academic journals. Assignments include weekly readers’ reports on others’ drafts.
HTBA

ENGL 9098a and ENGL 9099b, Dissertation Workshop  Naomi Levine

This workshop gathers biweekly, throughout the academic year, to workshop chapters, articles, and prospectuses. It is intended to foster conversations among advanced graduate students across diverse historical and geographic fields. Permission of the instructor is required.
T 1:30pm-3:25pm