Graduate Courses, 2026-27

  • ENG 890.3 | Research Methods

Fall and Winter 2026-27
Required for first-year MA and PhD students as part of their degree programs

ENG 890.3 is a Research Methods course designed to support professional skills development for Master’s and Doctoral students in the Department of English. Its focus is the discipline of literary textual studies: what we research, how we analyze texts and related materials, and how we propose, plan, and communicate the findings of our research projects. As well an overview of the basics of textual scholarship, the course will address research practices and supports, data management platforms, analytical and critical paradigms, and modes of research organization and dissemination. Discipline-specific assignments will be associated with each unit, enabling the direct application of skills towards degree-related outcomes, including the Master’s Project Proposal, the Master’s Thesis proposal, and the PhD Dissertation Proposal, which represents the department’s Doctoral Candidacy Assessment.

  • ENG 803.3 | J. R. R. Tolkien, Reimagining English Medieval Literature | Yin Liu

The influential fantasy fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien grew out of his academic career as a philologist working in medieval English; he not only reimagined medieval stories from northern Europe but also engaged in scholarly debates around them. His creative and scholarly work invites exploration of its medieval sources and subjects, but also challenges us to consider how medieval and modern fantasies of power, identity, and creation interact, in Tolkien’s 20th century and today.

We will read Tolkien’s major works of fiction and scholarship, and important medieval texts that he worked on as a scholar. The Old English works can be read in Modern English translation but will be discussed with reference to the Old English texts; the Middle English texts will be read untranslated, although we may consider some of Tolkien's own translation efforts. Students should be prepared to learn at least the tools and principles of reading and studying early English, even if they are not already proficient in reading Old English or any of the other languages that Tolkien drew on. Note that we will not devote significant time to later adaptations of Tolkien’s work (e.g. in film or other visual media) nor its influence on later literary production; the focus of the seminar will be on Tolkien’s own writing and its medieval precedents. 

  • ENG 803.3 | Seventeenth Century Literary Anthologies and the Curious Case of William Strode | Brent Nelson

In this course, we will ask: who was William Strode (1598–1645), and how did he come to rival John Donne as the most popular poet in private seventeenth-century miscellany collections? William Strode appears in no modern anthology of seventeenth-century literature, yet he is the second most collected poet of his time, after Donne. We will approach these questions by considering the role of private manuscript collections in the literary culture of seventeenth-century England and what these anthologies tell us about contemporary reading practices. We will examine both the materiality and the social nature of these documents: how they were put together and how our consideration of their material form can aid our understanding of the texts they contain; how those texts circulated; and what functions these collections served for those who compiled them. We will also look closely at the case of John Donne, the manuscript poet par excellence, using him as a model for asking why Strode might have been so widely read in his own time—and how it is that he has since disappeared without a trace in the canon of English literature. As part of our investigation, we will look closely at a single manuscript that contains both Donne and Strode and, as part of that consideration, produce a digital edition of that document for open access publication.

  • ENG 819.3 | The Transatlantic Nineteenth Century | Kandice Sharren

This course will explore the transatlantic print trade in the Anglophone world during the nineteenth century. In addition to developing foundational knowledge about how to engage with nineteenth-century print culture from textual production to copyright law, we will read authors whose writing and lives crossed the Atlantic, including Susanna Rowson, Felicia Hemans, Bamewawagezhikaquay/Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Mary Prince, Frederick Douglass, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Oscar Wilde.

  • ENG 819.3 | New Methodologies in Indigenous Literary Studies | Kristina Bidwell

The field of Indigenous literary studies is currently pushing the limits of traditional literary criticism. In his influential essay, “On Critical Humility,” Métis literary scholar Warren Cariou writes that literary criticism has traditionally considered the literary work as “an object, a thing” and he instead calls for academic work based in the recognition that the literary scholar is “in a relationship with the work and with the individual or community that produced the work.” This increasing focus on relationship, which Cariou describes as a quietly growing movement, has led to an increasing focus on literary methods that emphasize collaboration, community engagement, creative forms of research, public-facing scholarship, and engagement with non-literary, non-alphabetic, or oral texts. This course will explore these methodological movements in Indigenous literary studies by engaging with writers, scholars, and guest speakers who are leading these shifts.  Students will also have the opportunity to reflect on their own methods and to explore, on a small scale, some of these emerging approaches. In addition to studying secondary works by scholars such as Cariou, Daniel Heath Justice, and Sam McKegney, we will also read primary texts by contemporary Indigenous writers such as Louise Erdrich, Richard Wagamese, Lee Maracle, Niigaan Sinclair, and Tenille Campbell.

  • ENG 811.3 | African Diaspora Literatures and the Ethics of Empathy | Cynthia Wallace

This course will bring scholarly debates about empathy into conversation with fiction and poetry of the African diaspora. Drawing on studies of affect, transnationalism, interdisciplinary empathy studies, and the ethical turn in literary studies, we will consider how diasporic texts stage encounters across difference through form and content, highlighting the moral and political possibilities—and limitations—of feeling-with. 

  • ENG 805.3 | Dorothy L. Sayers and the Stakes of Golden Age Detective Fiction | Ann Martin

 Starting with her first novel Whose Body? (1923), Dorothy L. Sayers's Wimsey series of detective fiction illuminates the complicated politics of middlebrow modernism. This course will trace Sayers's engagement with both modernity and tradition. It will also involve contextualizing her work through Lord Peter's literary antecedents—Dupin, Holmes—and Sayers’s contemporaries both within and beyond the Detection Club. Critical perspectives on her intertextuality and narrative experimentation, including Q. D. Leavis’s scathing critique of both, will be aligned with a cultural studies approach focusing our discussions. Sayers’s explorations of the impact of World War I and of changing class and gender roles, as well as her imbrication in commodity culture and work in advertising will inform analysis of her vision of interwar community, where the changing landscape of Britain is not just metaphorical but literal and reflected in Sayers's renditions of telephones and typewriters, of motorcycles and the new electricity grid. We'll begin with tales from Poe and Conan Doyle before moving chronologically through Sayers's most prominent novels and a few short stories—with some optional viewing of television adaptations. The series of wartime pieces she wrote for the Spectator will end the course, as its abrupt cancellation sets the stage for her turn to Christian drama and to translation in the years following the success of her genre fiction.

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