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.
Fall Course Descriptions - 2026
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DHUM 601 Digital Humanities (DH)
Dr. Katayoun Torabi
Tue/Thurs 3:55 -5:10, LAAH 535
Digital Humanities (DH) is a field with considerable breadth of research methodologies and platforms. This course provides a graduate-level introduction to the methods and technologies used in the field of Digital Humanities, focusing especially on the history of digital approaches to the humanities and the use of digital technologies for humanities research, publishing, teaching, and communication. The first part of the course is dedicated to introducing students to DH tools, platforms, and methods--digitizing and encoding texts, data mining, computational analysis, network analysis, mapping, and visualization--by completing guided digital assignments. The second part of the course will focus on guiding students as they develop a final project proposal or paper centered around a topic of their choosing. This segment will emphasize refining the student's area of interest, formulating research questions, and constructing a well-organized proposal or paper. There is no disciplinary prerequisite, no extensive technical skills are required for the course, and no one disciplinary approach will be favored. DHUM 601 is cross listed with English 433, History 433, and DHUM 433. DHUM 601 is a graduate-level course on the list of approved classes for the Digital Humanities Certificate.
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ENGL 602: First Year Seminar
Dr. Shawna Ross
Friday, 12:30-3:30 pm. LAAH 463
Course Description
Comprehensive introduction to theory, method, and practice of graduate scholarship in English; develops familiarity with goals and practices of English studies, enhance research skills, formulate and articulate scholarship goals and projects, and practice writing genres within the field. Prerequisite: Enrollment as a first-year PhD student.
Section Description
This course will immerse you in the academic norms and processes of English studies, the motivations and intellectual standards that we hold as English teacher-scholars, and the practices of humanities research that introduce you as a new voice into existing or emerging scholarly conversations. The primary goal of this semester is to understand the components of doctoral education in our field, which will prioritize conceptualizing research and writing in the field and formulating approaches to developing original scholarship. In other words, what do we do in English and why and how do we do it? Our secondary goal is to contextualize all of the above to our experiences at A&M: how structure of our graduate program here at A&M will help you develop these skills and how our faculty here model and enact the ideals of the discipline.
Weekly readings will be taken from Eric Hayot’s The Elements of Academic Style, Gregory Colón Semenza’s Graduate Study for the 21st Century, and Zachary Shore’s Grad School Essentials: A Crash Course in Scholarly Skills. These readings are meta-critical; that is, they consider the kind of knowledge graduate study seeks to create and the methods for attaining such knowledge. They are intended to provide a systematic overview of the steps you will take during your degree program. Class meetings will begin with a discussion of the readings; you will come prepared each week having completed the readings and composed a short response paper that directly relates the content of the reading to your personal experiences in graduate school After a break, class will resume in the form of a workshop: a guided, collaborative exercise in which you will practice particular skills that will help you discern, for yourself, the academic and professional expectations, genres, and writing practices of both English in general and in your specialty field(s). They will also serve to reinforce your understanding of the expectations, requirements, and goals of this particular doctoral program.
In addition to attending regularly, participating actively, and submitting response papers, you will also organize and present at a mini-conference about contemporary English doctoral education. For this conference, you will shape a research agenda on a particular aspect of graduate education, create an annotated bibliography, write an abstract and scholarly biography, and present a short conference paper. Students will also be asked to serve as chairs of other panels and participate appropriately as audience members for their fellow students.
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ENG 610: Old English
Coming soon.
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611: Topics in Early Modern Literature: Convent Cultures
Dr. Nancy Warren
MW 4:10 - 5:25 pm. LAAH 535
English 611 Topics in Early Modern Literature: Convent Cultures
Far from being an impermeable boundary, the convent wall in early modern Europe was highly
permeable; individual nuns and nunneries as institutions were strongly connected to their local
communities and were deeply engaged in both secular and ecclesiastical politics. As Protestant
reformations and Catholic reform movements (both monastic reform movements and the larger
movement generally known as the counter-reformation) unfolded, nuns and nunneries took on
significant symbolic meanings for polemicists of all stripes.
This seminar explores writings by, for, and about early modern women religious in continental
Europe and the New World. We will consider such subjects as the ways in which English
convents in exile in France, Portugal, and the Low Countries served as loci of English Catholic
political activity and textual production; Protestant satirical writings about nuns and nunneries;
versions of medieval monastic texts for early modern women; the convent and the literary
canon; relationships among and textual exchanges among English, French, and Spanish
nunneries; and the roles of nuns in the colonization of the New World.
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ENGL 653: Planetary Health Humanities
Dr. Jessica Howell
TR 11:10 - 12:25, LAAH 535
This course is part of a series of ENGL 653 courses that focuses on emerging fields of research in the Health Humanities (Spring 2025’s topic was “Age and Memory Studies in the Health Humanities”). Fall 2026’s course will focus on the planetary Health Humanities. Recently, scholars including Heike Härting and Heather Meek make the case for the “transformative potential of the planetary” in “rethinking concepts of health and well-being.” In our seminar, we will place the emerging scholarship on planetary Health Humanities in critical conversations with ecocriticism, transnationalism, Global Health Humanities, and Critical Medical Humanities, and discuss how methodologies and topics compare. Literary readings include works by Sarojini Naidu, Rabindranath Tagore, Amitav Ghosh, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. We will also discuss how this emerging field contributes to the public humanities and provides opportunities for community engagement. Contributors to forthcoming publications on planetary Health Humanities will be invited as guest speakers.
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ENGL 655:Rhetoric after Information: Cybernetics, Systems, and Semiotics
Dr. Joshua DiCaglio
Wednesday, 12:30 AM - 3:30 PM, LAAH 463
This course will be a selective introduction to modern rhetoric theory through a particular question: how do modern developments in science and communication technologies reconfigure our conception of language, persuasion, and collective action?
Over the course of the twentieth century, language, communication, and persuasion became scaled so that molecules and electromagnetic waves themselves contain an interpretive possibility. The terms for this mode of thinking about language are familiar to us: data, information, code, and sign (as understood by semiotics) all imply the possibility of the embedding of communicative and rhetorically possibility within matter itself. But the scalar nature of this shift has not consigned communication to molecular, mechanical operations--it also extends to the global and ecological modes of in-forming that are already presupposed by propaganda and are developed in theories of communication based in systems theory. When combined with cybernetics, this mode of information places interpretation front-and-center. Information also makes it possible to consider the mechanical notion of action/reaction in terms of informatic exchange, semiotic process, or communicative effect. What then happens to the core concern of the rhetorical tradition: the need to understand how symbolic systems create effects (i.e. persuasion)? What is rhetoric after information theory renders communication as physical as matter itself? In turn, what is matter when it is considered informatic?
We will begin by situating these questions in recent conversations in rhetoric and communication studies. We will then read key texts in the development of this physical notion of information, starting with semiotics and information theory, and see how these frameworks are developed in cybernetics, speech-act theory, systems theory, biosemiotics, and science studies. For those in rhetoric, this will provide one through-line for considering rhetorical theory in relation to trends in science, philosophy, and technology. For those in literary studies, this will provide an examination of several lineages that are essential to current theoretical conversations: semiotics, structuralism, poststructuralism, and new materialism.
This course satisfies the theory requirement.
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ENGL 670: Topic and Description: The Borders of Chicano/a and Latino/a Culture
Dr. Juan Alonzo
Thursday, 12:45 -3:45 pm
For the fall 2026 semester, the ENGL 670 will focus on the border as a physical, metaphorical, rhetorical, and theoretical space for understanding contemporary Chicano/a and Latino/a cultural production. While borders (between nations, peoples, spaces) have always existed, there are few places in the world where the concept of the border carries greater meaning or consequence than the U.S.-Mexico borderlands: Américo Paredes conceives the borderlands as an in-between space where cultures collide; Gloria Anzaldúa sees it as a third space where mestizaje flourished; Walter Mingolo theorizes in the borderlands a potential for decoloniality. Thus, “border thinking” offers a critical lens for reading Chicano/a and Latino/a cultural production.
Some of the issues we will explore this semester include: the social and economic conditions that produce a borderlands; transnational cultural production and exchange along the border; immigration; the meaning of citizenship; the condition and creation of different social identities in a border space; translation. While we will focus on written texts (novels, short stories, poetry, memoir, criticism), we will also examine film and music. In addition to the aforementioned writers, other thinkers and artists under consideration include Rolando Hinojosa, Sandra Cisneros, Juan Felipe Herrera, Oscar Cásares, Cristina Rivera Garza, Junot Diaz, and Bad Bunny.
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ENGL 671: Readings in American Literature to 1900
Dr. Raymond Leonard
Tues. 6:00 - 9:00 pm. LAAH 535
One course in any literature, pre-1800.
"Inventing America"
This course is designed to offer graduate students a strong foundation in pre-1900 American literature and therefore does not have a strong thematic element. However the philosophy of this course is also that literature makes nations, and not the other way around, and as such the title of the course suggests an inevitable thematic conundrum. Namely: what is America? What counts as American literature? Who gets to decide? We will cover the "greats" that every graduate student needs to be familiar with -- Melville, Douglass, Dickinson, etc -- but we will also be reading weird stuff that challenges anything resembling a coherent early American canon.
By the end of this course, students will know what America is. If they don't they have to take it again.
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ENGL 680: Theories of Gender
Dr. Vanita Reddy
Tuesday, 12:45-3:45 pm. LAAH 463
This graduate-level course will examine theories of gender constitution and performance across a range of disciplines and sub-disciplines: literary studies, media studies, performance studies, feminist science studies, philosophy, sociology, and cultural anthropology.
Assigned readings will feature scholarship that has been published primarily, though not exclusively, in the last two decades. The seminar assignments and discussions will focus on contemporary debates about gender in relation to sex, sexuality, race, transnationalism, the law, technology, film, performance, the state, and social movements.
The course is built around four primary units:
- Troubling Conventions of Sex and Gender
- Visual and Performance Cultures of Gender
- Gender, Violence, and the State
- Transnational Feminist Politics of #MeToo.
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ENGL 695-600: Publication and Professionalization
Dr. Mary Ann O’Farrell, maof@tamu.edu
Thursday 12:45-3:45, LAAH 535
This class is designed to help advanced Ph.D. students transition from classwork to the independent research, writing, and professional activities that are central to a scholarly career, with a particular emphasis on producing a publishable scholarly work in English studies.
We will consider such issues as the differences between articles and dissertation chapters and between the dissertation and the book; professional practices and standards informing the writing, reviewing, revising, placement, and publication of scholarship; and the writing of abstracts and book proposals. We will also think together about other issues involved in professionalization, as determined by student interest.
A substantial portion of the course will be devoted to workshopping student articles, with an eye toward producing and submitting publishable, article-length work.
Feel free to contact me by email or to visit during office hours (on Wednesdays this semester, from 1:15-3:45 in 522 LAAH) with any questions about the course.
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ENGL 697: Pedagogy
Dr. Sara DiCaglio
Monday, 12:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m. LAAH 463
English 697 provides an introduction to the practical and theoretical aspects that
surround teaching at the college level, particularly within the writing classroom. The
course has three major goals:
● To provide a practical support mechanism for new or future instructors of
composition and writing. A portion of each class will be spent directly reflecting on
students’ ongoing and future teaching experiences by examining lesson plans,
commenting practices, and practical teaching scenarios.
● To develop an understanding of the theoretical background that surrounds the
teaching of writing by examining important historical and contemporary work in
writing studies and related pedagogical fields.
● To work to put these two sometimes disparate elements together. How can
pedagogical theory help inform your teaching on the ground? How can your
teaching on the ground help inform your interactions with pedagogical theory?
How can this study remain ongoing even as you move on to teaching different
courses and sub-disciplines? And how does any of this relate to your role as a
graduate student?
By the end of this course, students will have developed confidence as instructors, an
understanding of how to build pedagogical communities, a working knowledge of the
field of writing studies, and a toolkit to help develop their future pedagogy.