We offer between 8 and 11 graduate courses each semester. We have two types of courses: Readings courses and Topics courses. Topics courses are offered on a 3-semester rotation, and cover the major literary areas of English study. The majority of our courses each semester will be Topics courses, which are more focused or specialized courses designed by faculty members, often in their area of current research. Topics courses can be repeated three times for credit, as the content of these courses changes each semester.
For a full listing of graduate-level English courses and brief descriptions, visit the university’s graduate catalog.
Spring Courses 2026
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ENGL 603 (Bibliography and Literary Research)
Professor Kevin O’Sullivan
Tue/Thurs 11:10 -12:25, LAAH 326
This course will introduce the foundational theories and methodologies of modern textual criticism. Beginning with a consideration of the textual condition across periods and media, we will critique both traditional approaches to bibliography (broadly defined) as well as more recent work that exists on the vanguard of our field. These theoretical readings will be complemented by a series of scaffolded exercises designed to be practically useful to the MA or early PhD student. The course will be broadly organized around three questions: 1.) What sources are used in literary research? 2.) Where are these sources located? and 3.) How are these sources discovered and studied? In the process of answering these questions, students will cultivate an understanding of the major trends animating textual scholarship relevant to their specific subdiscipline. They will also develop robust research skills in the location, use, and responsible citation of both analog and digital sources. Finally, students will gain an awareness of the labor and politics underlying the work of the libraries and archival collections most relevant to their anticipated course of study.
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ENGL 604: Topics in Digital Research: Visualizing Knowledge
Professor Laura Mandell
Tue 6-9 pm. LAAH 535
In this class, we will examine the explosion of “big data” and explore techniques for understanding it. We will discern the most important components of data literacy as well as techniques for visualizing data. We will ask, what is the relationship between elements of our cultural heritage (literatures of the past and present) and “data”? Might the study of Art History help us discover the effects of financial incentives on knowledge visualization? What are the best techniques for exploring and understanding massive amounts of data?
Readings include Donna Haraway, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, Johanna Drucker, Sofiya Noble, Ruha Benjamin, Timnit Gebru, and more. Assignments will include responses to the readings and data visualizations (no prior training needed). Graduate students will write a seminar paper that involves creating a means for visualizing knowledge within their interests / specializations, analyzing their creation in relation to other data visualizations, and then describing the process and effects of their labors: did visualization actually “augment” cognition within their disciplines?
(No previous experience with coding / programming is necessary nor expected for the course work.)
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ENGL 608: Reading in Medieval Pre- 1800
Professor Nancy Warren
MW 4:10 - 5:25 pm. LAAH 535
This class focuses on texts written in Middle English from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries, which we will read for the most part in the original language. We will consider a wide range of genres, from religious didactic literature to saints' lives to lyric poetry to visionary texts to romance to drama. Authors under consideration will include the Gawain-poet, Julian of Norwich, Geoffrey Chaucer, Willism Langland, and Margery Kempe as well as many anonymous writers.
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611: Literature, Science, and Scale in the Early British Empire
Professor Whitney Sperrazza
M 6-9 pm. LAAH 463
This course offers a theoretical, literary, and scientific investigation of the miniature and the gigantic, with particular focus on early colonial England. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, England’s borders were rapidly expanding (think maps of the unexplored terra incognita and John Gerard’s encyclopedic Herbal) even as natural philosophers and poets were increasingly entranced by the microscopic (Robert Hooke’s Micrographia) and the atomistic (Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder). How does the concept of scale - both in its early modern and contemporary theorizations - help us better understand the resulting intimacies and tensions among things large and small in the early modern period?
Together we will engage closely with literature, science, and critical theory. Our primary texts will center on early modern colonial encounters as a way of focusing our investigation of scale. In addition to those referenced above, possible texts might include: poetry by John Donne and Margaret Cavendish; Thomas More’s Utopia; early printed maps and cartographic collections; Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania; catalogues of 17th-century curiosity cabinets; Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space; and Susan Stewart’s On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. The class will be taught in a seminar format, with active student participation through discussions and presentations.
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ENGL 638: Topics in 18/19th c British Literature New Approaches to the Brontës
Dr. Shawna Ross
M 12:45 -3:45 pm. LAAH 326
In the first half of the class, we will conduct extensive studies of the primary trio of novels upon which the family’s reputation rests: Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. This will build a broad base for our knowledge of Brontë criticism (and allow students the opportunity to develop substantial projects around one of these canonical texts). At the same time, we will be introduced to three of the most current methodological approach to their works, which can be roughly characterized as highlighting narrative techniques of transmitting materiality and embodiment that reveal the Brontës as grappling with race, the environment, and gender in previously unrecognized ways. This new approach not only reflects and generates methods applicable beyond the Brontës but also renews structuralist interrogations of narrative and genre that may have seem unfashionable or uninteresting until very recently. Students will not only grapple with the necessary concepts for generating these kinds of scholarly readings, but also will think about the cyclicality of scholarly trends and how they impact our decision-making as writers who (possibly) want to become published. We will discuss how to enter a scholarly conversation and position oneself vis-à-vis other scholar in mature and collaborative ways.
Whereas the first half of the course takes “new approaches” as a matter of methodology—of using and developing concepts that can be applied to any text—the second half of the class will focus on a new approach peculiar to Brontë Studies: the expansion of the family’s canon. In accordance with recent trends in editing the family’s works and considering their individual trajectories as artists in concert with their intertextual conversations, we will read the family’s less-studied works and turn our attention to publication history, cultural history, and authorial development. We will consider their poetry and visual art, as well as texts by their ill-fated brother Branwell and their father, who as a parson was much given to penning moralizing fables as an extension of his spiritual duties. We will also dip our toes into the family’s voluminous and strange juvenilia—the barely legible records of a dizzyingly complex and violent fantasy world based on the Napoleonic war games they played on the moors. These include Charlotte’s Shirley (a condition-of-England novel) and Villette (a prickly Gothic chronicle of mental health), Anne’s Agnes Grey (an all-too-polite fairy tale of governess martyrdom).
Students will complete weekly short response papers, write and present a literature review, and imagine and execute a final project. The response papers will propose a research agenda based on the reading. The literature review will characterize the past twenty years of scholarship on a given Brontë text and explain the trends that have emerged. Students may select among multiple formats for their final projects (traditional argumentative article, reference article, conference paper, digital project, or book proposal) and have the option to work collaboratively. For this project, they are encouraged, though not required, to use at least one text from the course’s second unit—that is, one of the lesser-studied works—so they are less likely to fall into the old patterns of criticism that this class eschews.
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ENGL 645: Women Writing Nature
Dr. Susan Egenolf (s-egenolf@tamu.edu)
MW 11:10 a.m.-12:25 p.m. LAAH 326
“Women Writing Nature” is designed as a survey of women’s representations of human interactions with the more-than-human world from the late 18th century to the present. The course will feature essays, memoirs, poetry, theory and novels from a range of women writers, including biologists, creative writers, anthropologists, philosophers, botanists, activists and travelers (in many cases, these categories will overlap in a single being). The historical breadth will allow us to track approaches to the natural world across two and a half centuries. For instance, when the Scottish traveler and amateur botanist Maria Calcott Graham visited Chile in 1824, she was both an agent of the British incursion in South America and an early proponent of Traditional Ecological/Indigenous Knowledge, learning many plant names and their uses from native Chileans. Like the Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, Graham valued indigenous knowledge alongside her understanding of Linnaean botany. Similarly, discussions of human cultivation of the natural world could run through Andrea Wulf’s work on the gardens of the revolutionary period that shaped American national identity, to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden, Louisa May Alcott’s Transcendental Wild Oats, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, Becky Chamber’s futuristic Psalm for the Wild-Built and Camille Dungy’s Soil. The readings and critical articles will give us a wide-ranging foundation in ecofeminism, animism, environmental justice, decolonial trajectories, and the stakes of our own entanglements with the natural world.
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ENGL 650—Readings in 20th and 21st Century Literature and Culture
Dr. Juan Alonzo
Thurs. 12:45 - 3:45 pm. LAAH 463
For spring 2026, ENGL 650—Readings in 20th and 21st Century Literature and Culture will offer a “remix” of the last 125 years of literary history. This is not a “greatest hits” course, but a collection of texts that, according to my experiences as a reader, offers a peek into the forms, themes, and currents of this period’s literature. Hopefully, my perspective on the literature is unique and idiosyncratic to my view of the world (I am an Americanist, focused on Latinx culture, allied with ethnic literatures, fascinated by modernist and postmodernist texts, in love with film). Thus, this readings course will offer MY reading list of some of the major subjects and authors of 20th and 21st century literature.
We will focus on the conceptual and historical pre- and the post- moments of the last century: modernism and postmodernism, the idea of the nation (in a postcolonial sense), the importance of social movements, and the challenge of defining literature in the digital age. The list of texts on offer in not yet finalized, but possible authors include:
Zora Neal Hurston, William Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, Rolando Hinojosa, Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Valeria Luiselli, Colson Whitehead, Hernan Diaz, Ada Limón, Juan Felipe Herrera
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ENGL 665: Topics in Cultural Studies--Pandemics
Professor Sara Dicaglio
W 12:45 - 3:45 pm. LAAH 326
March 2025 marked five years since Covid was declared a global pandemic. In conversation with the gravity of this moment, this course examines pandemics as cultural, rhetorical, scientific, and literary objects. The course will focus on both real pandemics, such as the Spanish Flu, HIV/AIDS, and Covid, as well as fictional representations of pandemics. In so doing, the course will encourage students to think about the intersection of cultural narratives, science, and lived experiences. How do narratives about patient zeroes, asymptomatic carriers, illness as invasion, and other cultural discourse about epidemics impact how we think and talk about actual pandemics (and about the actual human beings affected by these illnesses)? By connecting narratives written from and about these actual events to fictionalized narratives, including science fiction films and texts, zombie outbreak narratives, and even epidemic-themed board games, we will consider how epidemics connect with broader cultural themes and understandings, as well as what approaching epidemics through a cultural perspective can help us to understand in our current moment. Though the course’s primary focus will be US representations of pandemics, it will also invite a global health humanities lens to think broadly about different understandings and experiences of pandemics.
The course will likely ask students to complete a series of written reading responses, a book review that will be workshopped in class, and a final project that can take the form of a more traditional paper or a more expansive multi-modal or public humanities project. In order to trace cultural narratives of pandemics from a variety of perspectives, the course will draw from an interdisciplinary array of thinkers and disciplinary fields, including health humanities, graphic medicine, rhetoric of health and medicine, disability studies, science studies, and more. Some selected authors may include Paula Treichler, Priscilla Wald, Ling Ma, Margaret Atwood, Megan Glick, Susan Sontag, Blake Scott, Hsuan Hsu, Eli Clare, Arundhati Roy, MK Czerwiec, Tony Kushner, and Alondra Nelson. This course can fulfill the distribution requirement for theory or topics courses.
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ENGL 680: Theories of Gender
Dr. Sally Robinson sallyr@tamu.edu
Tue/Thur. 4:10 - 5:25 pm. LAAH 535
This course is designed for students who want to get a broad understanding of the questions that have animated interdisciplinary gender theory from the last decades of the 20th century into the present. We will begin with deep reading of a selection of foundational texts (Rich, Rubin, Crenshaw, Mohanty, Garland-Thompson, Butler, e.g.). The remainder of the semester reading will be organized around the following broad topics: Bodies, Sexualities, Genders; Gender, Work, Labor, Economy; and Feminisms, Post-Feminisms, Popular Feminisms. The bulk of the reading after the foundations section will be drawn from feminist journal articles and book chapters published within the last few years, which will give us a good sense of what issues are most compelling for gender theorists in the current moment. All readings will be posted on Canvas. Course requirements will include response papers to be presented to the class, a “follow the footnotes” assignment that will allow students to pursue a topic broached in one of our readings, an assignment on gender theory in non-academic spaces, and a final project.
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ENG 683: Topics in Theory: Introduction to Contemporary Literary Theory
Professor: Mikko Tuhkanen (mikko.tuhkanen@tamu.edu)
W 6-9 pm, TBD
This class introduces students to various discourses of contemporary (20th- and 21st-century) literary theory (structuralism, poststructuralism, Cultural Studies, queer theory, afropessimism . . . ) and their philosophical contexts (dialectics, materialism, linguistics, phenomenology, existentialism . . . ). The texts will be difficult and plentiful, but with the help of lectures and discussions we are able to explore aspects of contemporary thought that, for various reasons, have become important for the work that we do in literature departments. No previous knowledge of the fields is required.
Meets the following distribution requirement:
One course in theory (of any kind, including linguistics and rhetoric)