English Courses: Required and Elective
Spring 2027: English Literature & Cultural Studies Courses
ENG 105 - The Bible as Literature
Meeting Time: MTH 3:30-4:50
Professor: Dr. Cynthia Scheinberg
Have you ever felt you wanted to know more about the Bible but felt intimidated by the very thought of opening a Bible? Or are you someone who has a comfort level with the Bible in your own religious context, but wants to know more about its literary qualities? The main goal of this course is to help students become familiar with one the most famous “anthologies” ever compiled– the Bible –and to learn how to read it as a literary text. Organized by the major literary genres of the Bible, this course explores significant themes, characters, and teachings in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the Christian Scriptures (New Testament). We will explore the diverse cultures, religious traditions, and historical contexts that influenced this famous text. As we learn how to read Biblical texts as literature, we will also ask questions about Biblical meaning that include: Do these scriptural/literary texts offer models for how to live a good or virtuous life? Does belief define identity? How is the relationship to God explored through particular identity, culture, or peoplehood? Finally, we will include units on films and other literature that have used/adapted Biblical sources in more contemporary contexts. No prior knowledge of the Bible or religion is necessary. This course meets the Social Inquiry General Education requirements, as well as the Diversity Equity and Inclusion requirement for all students.
ENG 220 – Reading Like a Pro: Theory and Interpretation
Meeting Time: MTH 2-3:20
Professor: Dr. Jason Jacobs
This course introduces students to the most important critical and theoretical methods of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and gives students a chance to practice interpreting works of culture (mainly literature, but also film and other forms of popular culture) using different critical approaches. Critical movements featured include New Criticism, Structuralism, Marxist Criticism, Feminist Criticism, LGBT Studies and Queer Theory, Race-conscious criticism (especially the African American critical tradition), and Ecocriticism; but students will gain an overall understanding of how any critical/theoretical movement develops its own terms and methods and how different terms and methods can be put to work to produce new ways of understanding culture. Students work in teams to produce interpretations of a common text from a particular critical point of view. This semester, the common text is the film Everything Everywhere All at Once, directors Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert (2022). This course is required for English Literature Majors, English Literature Minors, and Cultural Studies Minors and meets the Social Inquiry & Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion General Education requirements for all students.
ENG 250 – Girls on Fire
Meeting Time: TTH 12:30-1:50
Professor: Dr. Laura D'Amore
Girls on Fire reads early North American literatures that center girls and young women as protagonists who inspire progressive transformation for the future. This course includes a range of works from different historical time periods as well as a variety of genres and forms. We will read key texts of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, focusing on pre-Colonial Indigenous myths and legends that foreground the sacred feminine; texts written by women; and texts written about girls and young women. Using the Girls on Fire framework, students will have the opportunity to read these representations of historically marginalized identities (race, gender, sexual identity, class, religion) in ways that reclaim and reposition girls and young women of early North America as progressive social change agents. This course counts toward the American Literature requirement for English Literary Studies majors and minors and meets the Social Inquiry General Education requirement for all students.
ENG 280 – Modern Love
Meeting Time: TTH 9:30-10:50
Professor: Dr. Jason Jacobs
In the first half of the 20th Century, British writers started thinking differently about love, sex, and literary form. In this course, we will read selected novels and short stories that reflect the building movement of literary modernism as well as changing ideas about relationships, sexuality, and social expectations, from the turn of the 20th Century to the onset of the Second World War. Students can look forward to convention-defying passions, illicit affairs, three-way love dramas, wistful memories of unrealized desires, and trips to the seedy underbelly of society in works by E.M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, DH Lawrence, and Christopher Isherwood. This course counts toward the British Literature requirement for English Literary Studies majors and minors and meets the Social Inquiry general education requirement for all students.
ENG 480 - Senior Thesis I
Meeting Time: T 5-7:50
Professor: Dr. Cynthia Scheinberg
This course is essentially a reading seminar: the first semester of the English majors’ capstone course sequence emphasizes applications of literary theory through intensive analysis of primary works, research into pertinent criticism, and the delivery of a substantial oral presentation. Students’ course work culminates in a formal thesis proposal with an extended bibliography. Required for all English Literary Studies BA students and Secondary Education/English double majors.
CULST 100 - Approaches to the Study of Society and Culture
Meeting Time: TF 2-3:20
Professor: Dr. Laura D’Amore
This course teaches students to analyze a variety of sources related to popular culture, material culture, and the built environment to examine diverse issues concerning race, class, gender, and sexuality. Using a variety of sources, such as popular culture, material culture, and the built environment, and viewing them through diverse lenses, such as race, class, gender, sexuality, and religion, students will practice applying the skills of retrieval, evaluation, analysis and interpretation of written, visual, and aural evidence in the construction of well-argued narratives. All students are welcome. No prerequisites. This course is an interdisciplinary elective option for ENG majors.
CULST 370: Warrior Women
Meeting Time: TF 3:30-4:50
Professor: Dr. Laura D’Amore
Have you ever wondered what it means that warrior women in contemporary American literature and pop culture are almost always violent? What does it mean that some of our most beloved fictional characters enact violence on other people in order to achieve their desired result? This course will examine warrior women who act violently as an act of protection of themselves or others, and/or whose violence makes communities safer. We will look at YA Lit – Sunny in Akata Witch. Comic book adaptations – X-23 in Wolverine, and Jessica Jones. We will look at television – Sweet/Vicious and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And we will look at film –the women of Black Widow and Wakanda Forever. We will ask: what role is violence playing in these stories? What structural conditions have made it necessary for these characters to become warrior women? Have warrior women always been violent? How can we reconcile violence and feminism? No previous knowledge of any of these topics is needed to succeed in this course. All with an interest in Warrior Women in American pop culture over the past 30 years are welcome.
Students from Dr. Jacobs’ Fall 2026 Women Warriors class get priority registration for this class. This course meets the Gen Ed requirements for Social Inquiry and DEI, and counts as a course toward the English major, and the Cultural Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Preservation Studies minors.
CULST 372: Black Media Matters
Meeting Time: MTH 3:30-4:50
Professor: Dr. Leslie Grinner
This course examines representations of Black identity and experience across media and popular culture, including film, television, music, advertising, news, and social media. Students will explore how media shapes understandings of power, privilege, and identity while considering stereotypes, cultural expression, resistance, and social change. Through critical analysis of historical and contemporary media, students will investigate the role of Black creators and audiences in challenging dominant narratives and shaping popular culture. This course meets the Gen Ed requirements for Social Inquiry and DEI, and counts as a course toward the English major, and the Cultural Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Preservation Studies minors.
CULST 372/FILM 353: French Cinema
Meeting Time: T 2-4:50
Professor: Dr. Jason Jacobs
Americans love the movies; but the French are cinema connoisseurs. This course is at the same time a survey of French cinema history and an exploration of how French filmmakers and spectators entrust film as an art form with the task of explaining what France is and who the French are. French cinema is understood to reflect national history (including the history of the present), cultural identity, and changes in society—but it is also expected to push boundaries, challenge norms, and show us things we might prefer to ignore. Throughout the semester, we will analyze how forms, style, design, editing, and the recycling of common themes create meaning in films and elicit responses from viewers. Expect frank discussions of gender and sexuality; national identity; colonialism, immigration, and racism; and the meaning of life itself. Fulfills a course requirement in the Film Studies minor and counts as an elective course for English Literary Studies majors and minors + Cultural Studies minors.
Fall 2026: English Literature & Cultural Studies Courses
ENG 100 - Mindful Reading
Meeting Time: Tu Th 12:30-1:50
Professor: Dr. Cynthia Scheinberg
This is a course for students who like to read and discuss literature. It will cover a variety of literary forms including poetry, short fiction, novel, drama and/or non-fiction prose. Students will learn to identify the building blocks of literary genres, while also practicing interpretation, close-reading and historical contextualization. Readings and discussions will highlight how diverse identities and perspectives impact the creation and interpretation of literature, as well as discuss different attitudes to literature from different historical and national contexts. Along with an emphasis on techniques of mindful and critical reading, students will also be introduced to various modes of critical writing about literature, including personal reflection, close-reading and persuasive use of evidence.
Counts for the English Literary Studies major as well as the Social Inquiry and Humanities GE requirement. No pre-requisites or prior experience with literature required.
ENG 250.01 – Forbidden Lit
Meeting Time: Tu Fr 3:30 - 4:50
Professor: Dr. Laura D’Amore
Have you read any banned books lately? You probably have, because over the past two hundred years, a shocking array of moral, legal, and cultural justifications have gotten literary texts into all kinds of trouble, in terms of publication, distribution, or popularity. Writers are not arbiters of public opinion, and what is “acceptable,” “award winning,” or “cutting edge” in one generation might be forbidden lit in another. Reception is fickle, as social and cultural norms shift. In this course we will read American literature written since 1865, that has been forbidden either in its time or our own. We will also explore the cultural and historical contexts that have led to these ebbs and flows of taste, popularity, and even vulgarity in the literary - and audience - imagination.
Counts for the English Literary Studies major and minor as well as the Social Inquiry and Humanities GE requirement, and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion GE requirement. Required for Secondary Education/English Literary Studies double majors.
ENG 280 – Women Warriors
Meeting Time: Tu Th 11-12:30
Professor: Dr. Jason Jacobs
Not all damsels are in distress, and sometimes the knight in shining armor is a woman! This course examines the figure of fighting women in pre- and early-modern literary texts, from early depictions of Amazon warriors to Joan of Arc to the female knights of Renaissance epic poetry. We will consider how women warriors fit—or don’t—into the cultural codes of warrior masculinity constructed in literary texts, and how these women challenge—or not—the ideologies of femininity shaping readers’ ideas about who and what women are or can be. And we will reflect on the striking recurrence of the theme of ‘martial maids’ in canonical literary works: the warrior woman is not a niche interest, but a cultural obsession lasting centuries. NOTE: this course is linked with Dr. D’Amore’s Spring 2027 course CULST 370: Warrior Women, which will focus on contemporary US popular culture and media. Students enrolled in ENG 280 in Fall 2026 will be granted priority registration for CULST 370 in Spring 2027.
No prerequisites (contact instructor if unable to register). Meets a major and minor requirement in English Literary Studies, required for Secondary Education/English Literary Studies double majors. Meets the Social Inquiry and Humanities GE requirement.
ENG 320 – Global Literatures: Fiction from Africa
Meeting Time: M Th 3:30-4:50
Professor: Dr. Cynthia Scheinberg
In this course, we will look at fiction (written in English) from writers representing a range of African countries, including Nigeria, Cameroon, Zimbabwe and South Africa, among others, with a focus on women writers. Topics will include colonial and post-colonial history, African responses to Western representations of Africa, environment and climate, gender and sexuality, exile and immigration; we will also watch a Nollywood (“Nigerian Hollywood”) film. Students will do research projects on different aspects of these national cultures and writers to contextualize our readings within the diversity of African identities and nationalities; we will devote some time to the important critical theorists in this field as well. Finally, we will consider our own positionality as U.S. based readers of African literatures, considering questions like: what responsibilities do readers have when they engage with literary traditions that are not our own, how can we consider and reconsider our different assumptions about African identity, and how reading these texts might broaden our assumptions about literature more generally. Along with weekly reading, assignments will include online discussion boards, informal responses, a final project and research presentations. This course counts toward the Global Literature requirement for English Literary Studies majors and meets Global and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion GE requirements.
ENG 481 - Senior Thesis II
Meeting Time: Tu 5-8
Professor: Dr. Jason Jacobs
In the second semester of the Senior Seminar, each student writes a substantial thesis of publishable quality based upon readings explored in ENG 480. Primarily a writing seminar, students meet individually with the professor each week to advance the draft through the writing process. Students present abstracts of their final papers at a public colloquium.
CULST 100 - Approaches to the Study of Society and Culture
Meeting Time: Tu F 2-3:20
Professor: Dr. Laura D’Amore
Meeting Time: M Th 3:30-4:50
Professor: Dr. Laura D’Amore
This course teaches students to analyze a variety of sources related to popular culture, material culture, and the built environment to examine diverse issues concerning race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Using a variety of sources, such as popular culture, material culture, and the built environment, and viewing them through diverse lenses, such as race, class, gender, sexuality, and religion, students will practice applying the skills of retrieval, evaluation, analysis and interpretation of written, visual, and aural evidence in the construction of well-argued narratives. All students are welcome.
No prerequisites. This course is an interdisciplinary elective option for ENG majors. Required for Cultural Studies minor. Meets Social Inquiry and Humanities + Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion GE requirements.
CULST 370.01: Girl Culture
Meeting Time: M Th 2-3:20
Professor: Dr. Laura D’Amore
This course examines the lives of girls, and makes the assertion that the study of girls needs to be separated from the study of women, and from the study of children and adolescents. The experience of gender on the development of girls is profoundly affected by their social location, which is shaped by class, race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, disability, and geography. This class critically examines cultural assumptions about the identities of girls, and the ways that girls are, or are not, agents of their own lives.
Using literature, popular and material culture, and film from the 20th and 21st centuries as our context, we will focus our frame on the lives of girls who experience marginalization as a result of identity factors that are out of their control. We will interrogate the assumptions that are made about their lives while centering girls’ self-representation, and tracing these patterns in the larger social context of United States history and culture.
No prerequisites. Counts as elective for the English Literary Studies major and minor, meets requirements for Cultural Studies minor, and counts toward Social Inquiry and Humanities GE requirement, and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion GE requirements.
CULST 370.02: Finding Ourselves
Meeting Time: Tu Th 12:30-1:50
Professor: Dr. Jason Jacobs
This course examines narratives of self-discovery in contemporary literature and media. While the theme of self-knowledge is a constant in cultures from all over the world, going back centuries, today we mainly think of finding our “true” selves as a process of coming to terms with “who we are” as gendered and sexual beings. “Coming out” names a social process of shifting what others know about us, but this course focuses on howwe come to know ourselves as a literary and cultural phenomenon. From Glee to Genderqueer via But I’m a Cheerleader!, Call Me by Your Name, and—yes—Heated Rivalry, we will interrogate the ways available to us for telling the story of who we are.
No prerequisites. Counts as elective for the English Literary Studies major and minor, meets requirements for Cultural Studies minor, and counts toward Social Inquiry and Humanities GE requirement, and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion GE requirements.
CULST 372: The Car and the World That Made It
Meeting Time: Tu 2-5
Professor: Dean Lampros
Throughout its long history, cars have always been more than a means to get from point A to point B. They have been a shifting symbol of independence, innovation, modernity, prosperity, consumerism, masculinity, and the American Dream; youth culture, rebellion, sex, and danger; both liberation and oppression for women, people of color, and immigrants; and, more recently, environmental degradation, deindustrialization, the enduring presence of labor unions, America's dependence on foreign oil, and her struggle to compete in an increasingly globalized economy. Now, in the twenty-first century, with the rise of Uber and ride-sharing apps, the advent of self-driving vehicles, a renewed emphasis on public transportation and walkability, and an entire generation that appears uninterested in driving, one cannot help but wonder whether we are witnessing the end of America's long love affair with the open road.
No prerequisites. Counts as elective for the English Literary Studies major and minor, meets requirements for Cultural Studies minor, and counts toward Social Inquiry and Humanities GE requirement, and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion GE requirements.