Fall 2025 EN Course Descriptions
English majors and minors are encouraged to complete the advising template (PDF) before meeting with their academic advisors. Those who choose to register online might consider filling out the document in Word, saving it to a file, and then e-mailing it to their advisors as part of the "permit to register" request.
English Department Course Offerings - Fall 2025
200-Level Courses
Texts and Contexts: Afrofuturism
EN 202.01 – T/TH 1:40-2:55 PM
EN 202.02 – T/TH 3:05-4:20 PM
Dr. Trevon Pegram
“The trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans
I say, the trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans”
------Nikki Giovanni, “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars)”
What do Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, Parliament Funkadelic’s Mothership Connection, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and Beyoncé’s Renaissance have in common? They can all be placed within the genre and aesthetic of Afrofuturism. One way to think about Afrofuturism is as a way of imagining, questioning, and exploring the past, present, and future through a Black lens. By centering the Black American experience, Afrofuturism uses science, technology, and futurity to challenge the notions of a raceless and colorblind future that often dominate science fiction narratives of space conquest, exploration, and technology.
In this course, our examination of Afrofuturism will propel us backwards into America’s past and forward into its unknown future. Through this time traveling, we will explore how Afrofuturism is used to reject and reimagine historic systems of injustice and oppression, while also offering guidance for alternative ways of being in the world. To survey the expansiveness of Afrofuturism, we will read literary texts, view films, listen to albums, and ruminate on visual art. In addition to the texts mentioned at the outset, our course will also probe works by W.E.B Du Bois, Nikki Giovanni, Tracy K. Smith, Sun Ra, Janelle Monae, and André 3000 to name a few.
Major Writers: Gender, Culture, and Madness
EN 206.01 – T/TH 10:50 AM-12:05 PM
Dr. Melissa Girard
In this team-taught course, we will study the foundational connections between literature and psychology. Featuring literature and films by influential American authors who underwent psychiatric treatment, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and Susanna Kaysen, the course will explore the relation between creativity and mental illness. Throughout history and across cultures, the label of “madness” has often been applied to individuals whose gender identities, emotions, and behaviors fall outside social norms. Through case studies focused on topics including neurasthenia, gaslighting, depression, trauma, addiction, and body image, we will examine how gender constructs and values continue to shape definitions of mental health and illness. In addition to counting toward the second core English requirement, the course will also fulfill a Diversity-Justice course requirement and count toward the Gender and Sexuality Studies minor. Cross-listed as PY 270.01. Please note that both EN 101 and PY 101 are prerequisites for this course.
Major Writers: Classical Myth
EN 211.01 – M/W/F 11:00-11:50 AM
Dr. Aaron Palmore
In this course, we will examine Greek mythology through an assessment of primary sources—Hesiod’s Theogony, the Homeric Hymns, and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Myths are stories told for a purpose, and we will think about those potential purposes as much as the stories themselves. The guiding question of the course is: how does myth inform and challenge ideas about ethics and identity at the cultural and individual level? The stories we encounter will be about people figuring out who they are, what kind of world they live in, and what kind of world they want to live in. By reflecting on them, we can do the same!
Comic Books as Lit, TV & Cinema
EN 220.01 – M/W 4:30-5:45 PM
Dr. Brett Butler
Justice & Hope: Writing the U.S.
EN 265.01 – M/W 3:00-4:15 PM
Dr. Hunter Plummer
This course fulfills the Diversity-Justice Course Requirement and other course requirements.
In a moment where many in the United States of America feel hopeless or that justice
is an unattainable, intangible dream, this course approaches American literature through
a lens of protest. We will explore how a diverse collection of film, theater, prose,
poetry, and song can reveal the ways literature reflects, informs, and changes the
nation’s history and the lives of its residents. Writers such as Henry David Thoreau,
Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, Zitkala-Ša, Heidi Schreck, and John Waters show
how social movements in this country’s history have sought or can seek to improve
the lives of oppressed people and communities. Sometimes through incremental change,
sometimes through radical direct action, the protests depicted in these works offer
a hope that, one day, justice will be found.
Growing Up Modern
EN 280.01 – T/TH 9:25-10:40 AM
Dr. Mark Osteen
Childhood and adolescence are modern inventions. Building on that premise, this course explores how the literature of the past two-plus centuries has depicted childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. Among the questions we ask in the course are these: what trials and triumphs do children and adolescents endure on their way to adulthood? How do children, teens, and young adults respond to authority? How do unusual people (such as disabled youths) challenge norms and beliefs? Is coming of age the same across different cultures and ethnicities? How have representations and beliefs about childhood, adolescence and maturation changed over the decades? Readings will include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, short stories by James Joyce and others, and a selection of recent novels that may include Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Susan Nussbaum’s Good Kings Bad Kings, and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys. Each student will complete a research project and deliver an oral presentation. Students will also write two brief papers in which they reflect on their own identities and disabilities. Let’s grow up together!
300-Level Courses
Shakespeare: History & Tragedies
EN 310.01 – M/W 3:00-4:15 PM
Dr. Thomas Scheye
“He doth bestride the narrow world/ Like a colossus.” The way Cassius describes Julius Caesar can describe Shakespeare as well; his achievement towers over all other authors’ in our language. Shakespeare does more than write plays; he creates a world—one where the characters come alive for us and the language becomes part of our common inheritance as English speakers. This course focuses on Shakespeare’s history plays where that world is first defined and his mature tragedies where it finds it finest expression.
Topics in Victorian Literature: The Brontes - Wild at Heart
EN 361.01 – T/TH 4:30-5:45 PM
Dr. Gayla McGlamery
They were an unusual family—three sisters and a brother who grew up in an isolated Yorkshire village with only servants’ gossip, their father’s books and journals, and their own extraordinary imaginations to entertain them. Over the course of their short lives, Branwell produced little more than some juvenilia and a number of bad paintings, but Anne, Emily, and Jane left distinctive marks upon the literary world, publishing at least five novels of note, among them three acknowledged masterpieces. In this class, we will study five Bronte novels—Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Villette, along with selected poems and early writings. We will examine these strange and wonderful works in the context of the Bronte’s lives, their reading, and the literary, religious, and political movements that define the late eighteenth and early-to-mid-nineteenth century. We will also view at least one film adaptation.
American Lit to the First World War
EN 366.01 – T/TH 1:40-2:55 PM
Dr. Sondra Guttman
Modern Fiction
EN 370.01 - T/TH 9:25-10:40 AM
Dr. Gary Slack
400-Level Courses
Seminar in Early American Lit
EN 432.01 – M/W/F 10:00-10:50 AM
Dr. Stephen Park
The State of Maryland’s official website recounts the story of the first “settlers” arriving in Maryland in 1634. But what does it mean to settle a place? What do the narratives of settlement tell us about the people who were already there and then found themselves being “settled”? What do these narratives tell us about the people who arrived in America and the way they saw themselves? The literature of Early America often featured narratives of settlement as a way to assert the idea that European colonization was inevitable and a mark of progress. This course sets out to un-settle these narratives by centering other literary voices and other possibilities for the Americas.
We will read a wide array of texts from the 16th century to the early 19th century, including works by women, Black authors, and Native American authors. We will also look at more canonical texts and explore ways of locating a Native presence in them, as well. Our reading will include early American writers such as Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Mary Rowlandson, Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, William Apess, and James Fenimore Cooper. This course will also unsettle established narratives about Early America by turning to recent works of historical fiction to see how modern writers have recovered or reimagined marginalized voices. These modern texts will include Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis, and Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.
Note for English Majors: this course counts toward the Pre-1800 requirement.
Seminar in Lit Topics before 1800: Medieval Men, Masculinity, and Violence
EN 439.01 – T/TH 3:05-4:20 PM
Dr. Kathy Forni
Toxic masculinity is in the news again, as it has been intermittently for the past ten years. Some contemporary activist groups invoke the Middle Ages as a time when men were free to act “naturally” by freely exerting their dominance and aggression. Theorists suggest that expressions of hypermasculinity are in reaction to men perceiving that they are losing ground or power—socioeconomically and politically. This course looks at men (and a woman, Joan of Arc) between 750-1500 and how they both used violence to exert their social identity, and were used by those in power to perpetuate a religious or feudal status quo in the name of social stability.
Texts will probably include: Beowulf, Song of Roland, Ibn Fadlan's “Account of the Rus,” Chretien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, Njals’ Saga, Arabian Nights, The Trial of Joan of Arc.
Honors Seminar: Blue Notes: The Literature of Jazz
EN 470.01 – T/TH 12:15-1:30 PM
Dr. Mark Osteen
Honors Seminar. By invitation only.
That great sage Dizzy Gillespie once asked, “To be or not to bop?” Answer: to be bop.
By the end of this course, you will do just that.
As Ken Burns showed us twenty years ago, jazz music has a distinguished history. What he didn’t reveal is that there is also a history of writers representing and imitating the music’s dynamic emotions and virtuoso techniques. This course will explore the many ways that jazz has inspired literature. We’ll follow its migration northward from New Orleans, with brief stops at some stations—swing, bop, cool, Afro-Cuban, and free—that it passed along the way. We’ll visit with the alleged inventor of jazz, Buddy Bolden, in Michael Ondaatje’s fascinating collage novel, Coming Through Slaughter; we’ll stride through poetry by Black writers such as Langston Hughes (Montage of a Dream Deferred, Ask Your Mama), Amiri Baraka, and others; we’ll swing to short stories by authors such as Eudora Welty and James Baldwin; we’ll call and respond to August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, nod our heads to the autobiography of iconic singer Billie Holiday, sight-read cool novels by James Weldon Johnson (Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man), Dorothy Baker (Young Man with a Horn), and one about a closeted trans trumpeter by the Afro-Scottish writer Jackie Kay. We will spend some time discussing how jazz artists have led the way in protesting against racial injustice and show how Latin jazz emerged and became a dominant form. And of course we will listen to loads of music by artists ranging from Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker to Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and contemporary artists to trace how jazz has influenced genres such as hip hop.
Students will post weekly on Moodle, give oral and musical presentations about their favorite artists or genres, write a research paper, and attend musical performances. Plus, in the spirit of jazz, students will experiment with different types of writing that reflect the music’s rich palette of hues and cries. Basic musical knowledge is an asset but is not required.
Ready to deedle a dee rop a wee boop bop? Ah-one, ah-two, ah-one, two, three, four. . . .
Seminar in African American Lit: August Wilson
EN 481.01 - T/TH 10:50 AM-12:05 PM
Dr. Trevon Pegram
August Wilson (1945 - 2005) is one of the most significant American playwrights of the 20th century. His plays are amongst the most highly lauded works in American theater, garnering two Pulitzer Prizes, a Tony Award, a Grammy Award, and seven New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards. Wilson is also the first and only Black American playwright to have a Broadway Theater named in honor of his life and achievements. More recently, two of his plays, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Piano Lesson, have been adapted into Netflix films.
Wilson’s reputation rests on his ten-play American Century Cycle, also referred to as the Pittsburgh Cycle, a collection of ten plays all (except one) set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. Moving from the 1900s to the 1990s, each play in the cycle explores a different decade of Black American life. In this course, through a mixture of reading and viewing, we will examine every play in the cycle. We will move chronologically from Gem of the Ocean (set in 1904) to Radio Golf (set in 1997). To broaden our engagement with the cycle, we will supplement the plays with interviews, scholarly criticism, blues music, and film screenings. Our class also coincides with The Baltimore August Wilson Celebration, a multi-year event where the Baltimore theater community plans to bring the entire cycle to the stage. This means that we will, hopefully, have the opportunity to experience one of Wilson’s plays live.
EN 099 English Internships
Students may take one internship course for degree credit. The course counts as an elective, not as a course fulfilling requirements for an English major or minor. Students taking an internship course are responsible for locating the internship and must work at least ten hours per week. For-credit internships include biweekly meetings with Dr. Cole and other fellow interns, and students undertake a series of reflective and goal-setting activities that can be highly beneficial aspects of the career discernment process. Internships may be done locally in the Baltimore-Washington region or remotely, but written or electronic permission of the instructor is required and all arrangements for a spring semester internship must be made prior to the end of the drop/add period. Interested students should contact Dr. Forni (kforni@loyola.edu) , the departmental internship supervisor, before registration.