Spring 2027 English 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.

Spring 2027 Course Offerings

200-Level Courses

Special Topics: Austen and Film
EN 200.01 - T/TH 1:40-2:55 PM
Dr. Gayla McGlamery

Filmmakers began to adapt the novels of Jane Austen to the screen as early as 1938 when the BBC presented its version of Pride and Prejudice, a production broadcast, but sadly not preserved on film. Since then, at least forty TV or movie adaptations of the novels have been offered in response to Austen’s enduring popularity. If Jane Austen is not the originator of the rom-com, as some have claimed, she is certainly the wittiest observer of relations between men and women among authors whose novels have been translated to film.

For this course, we will read and analyze three of Jane Austen’s works and view a selection of film and television adaptations of each. We will also read some film theory and film criticism to support our study of the works. Film selections will include several traditional British and U.S. feature films, a Bollywood movie, and at least one limited TV series.

Majors 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.

Black Women Writers
EN 208.01 - T/TH 9:25-10:40 AM
Dr. Sondra Guttman

Did you know that the second woman in America to publish a book of poems was enslaved —and she did it as a teenager? Get to know Phillis Wheatley and other literary superstars whose courageous voices inspired social justice movements and empowered people globally to envision and work towards a better world. The innovative works we’ll read challenge the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, poetry and prose, and autobiography and history. Topics include gender and sexuality studies, racial construction and identity, the transatlantic slave trade, diaspora, The Harlem Renaissance, and the Black Arts Movement. Writers include Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Yaa Gyasi.

The emphasis is on shorter readings (stories, poems, essays, and selections from longer works) with a novel at semester’s end. The work includes weekly posts, a midterm, and a final exam, two short essays, and a collaborative teaching project.

This course fulfills your second-level English or History core requirement and is Diversity-Justice designated. The course also counts towards minors in African and African American Studies (AAAS), Peace and Justice, and Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Lit Onstage, Yesterday & Today
EN 215.01 - M/W 3:00-4:15 PM
Dr. Hunter Plummer 

This course fulfills the Diversity-Justice Course Requirement.

The theater can be incredibly communal and even vulnerable for the performer and the audience as they occupy a shared physical space and grapple with ways to (literally) stage a protest or commentary on the writer’s society and culture.

In this course, you will dive into the abrasive, provocative, and experimental world of modern and contemporary theater. You will study plays and musicals as works of literature—not just things to produce onstage—to develop and hone the skills needed to analyze scripts and performances in the same way you would prose and poetry, while also have the opportunity to attend a local professional production.

This course will draw upon the rich traditions of the United States, United Kingdom, Argentina, Nigeria, and beyond—including works in translation—to expose you to a global vision of the last 100 years of drama and its major artistic and literary movements, showing how theater reflects the developments and problems of communities around the world.

Possible plays and musicals studied include Fefu and Her Friends (María Irene Fornés), Machinal (Sophie Treadwell), Mother Courage (Bertolt Brecht), Maybe Happy Ending (Hue Park and Will Aronson), The Camp (Griselda Gambaro), Death and the King’s Horseman (Wole Soyinka), Assassins (Sondheim/Weidman), The Nosebleed (Aya Ogawa), and Heroes of the Fourth Turning (Will Arbery).

 
Classical Receptions: Homer's Odyssey and Its Legacy
EN 216.01 / CL 216.01 - M/W/F 10:00-10:50 AM
Dr. Aaron Palmore

In the Summer of 2026, Christopher Nolan’s film version of Homer’s Odyssey gave new life to an old story for the American public. This moment didn’t come from nowhere: in just the few years before Nolan’s take hit theaters, EPIC went viral, Madeline Miller’s Circe was a bestseller, and scholarly works like Cox and Theodorakopoulos’ Homer’s Daughters appeared. This course will start with a close reading of Homer’s Odyssey, consider Odysseus on the 5th-century BCE Athenian stage, and reflect on what the Romans did with Homer’s cast of characters before jumping to more contemporary takes on Odysseus, Penelope, and the rest of the cast of Homer’s tale. We’ll discover how generations of artists have made their mark on Homer’s story by presenting new readings that speak to the concerns of different times, places, and cultures. By the end of the course, we will look to the future as we make our own creative interventions.

Comic Books as Literature, TV & Cinema
EN 220.01 - M/W/F 10:00-10:50 AM
EN 220.02 - M/W/F 11:00-11:50 AM
Dr. Brett Butler

The impact of comic books, graphic novels, and manga have had on popular culture is massive. However, it is only in the last couple decades that these mediums have become the topic of proper scholarly debate and criticism. This course exposes students to a variety of comic books and graphic novels and teaches them how to discuss them academically. Whether they are dedicated comic book fans or mildly interested newcomers, students learn to develop a more profound appreciation for visual storytelling.

Justice & Hope: Writing the U.S.
EN 265.01 - M/W/F 9:00-9:50 AM
Dr. Hunter Plummer 

This course fulfills the Diversity-Justice Course Requirement and other course requirements.

This course approaches American literature through a lens of protest in response to a current period when a hope for justice can feel unattainable and intangible. We will explore how a diverse collection of film, theater, prose, and verse 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, Lorraine Hansberry, Heidi Schreck, and Susan Muaddi Darraj 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 activism depicted in these works offer a hope that, one day, justice will be found.

300-Level Courses

Milton
EN 320.01 - M/W 3:00-4:15 PM
Dr. Thomas Scheye

In his essay, The Reason of Church Government, Milton describes his ambition this way: “That what the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome . . . and those Hebrews of old did for their country, I, in my proportion, with this over and above of being a Christian, might do for mine.”  In choosing to tell the story of the Fall of Man, Milton is deliberately courting comparison with Moses as the author of Genesis.  In plotting his career from the pastoral “Lycidas” to the epic Paradise Lost, and its sequel Paradise Regained, he is comparing his achievement to that of Virgil. And near the end of his career in Samson Agonistes, he composes a tragedy in the style of Sophocles. Such ambition may suggest something of the challenge that reading Milton inevitably entails, but something of the rewards as well. And yet in Paradise Lost, he promises “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.” Careful readers will conclude he keeps his promise.

American Literature to the First World War
EN 366.01 - T/TH 3:05-4:20 PM
Dr. Sondra Guttman

The United States is a nation famously founded on the power of dissent. What can American literature tell us about protest and power, about the path from narration to positive social transformation? This semester we’ll explore expressions and depictions of this American impulse, tracing its contradictions and complexities and reflecting on its implications for U.S. society today. We’ll explore dissenting literature around the topics of abolition, feminism, immigration reform, Indigenous rights and labor rights. Readings are by some writers you may be familiar with (Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Henry David Thoreau), and many that may be new to you (Harriet Jacobs, Zitkála-Šá, Ida B. Wells).

In this course, not only will you learn about the literature of the past, but you'll apply what you've learned to motivate change on campus today. This course is a community-engaged learning course. At the start of the semester, we'll discuss the Loyola Connections to Slavery project, and then, as a class, organize an event for the campus community that can make real change happen, here and now. 

Course requirements include blog posts and reflections on our community-engaged project, collaborative discussion leadership, one close reading essay, a midterm exam, and choice of final research essay or exam. This course fulfills the 19th-century literature requirement for the EN major and the Diversity-Justice course requirement for graduation. It also counts towards the American Studies minor.

Topics in African American Literature: Harlem Renaissance
EN 375.02 - M/W/F 2:00-2:50 PM
Dr. Trevon Pegram

In 1925, Alain Locke identified Harlem as the center of Black American culture. In doing so, he helped to establish one of the most praised (and criticized) Black cultural and literary movements of the 20th century: The Harlem Renaissance. From its inception at the close of WWI until its eventual demise during the Great Depression, the Harlem Renaissance was a vital period when, as Langston Hughes proclaims, “the Negro was in vogue.” This class will grapple with what it meant for Black artists (writers, musicians, filmmakers, etc.) to be “in vogue” and the broader complexities and contradictions of this surge in notoriety. To understand the breadth of this period, we will examine novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, and films. The course will also introduce students to both central and marginal figures of the Renaissance, including Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, George Schuyler, Nella Larsen, Oscar Micheaux, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Duke Ellington. This course will provide a broad overview of the Harlem Renaissance, its influence on later Black cultural movements, and its continued relevance 100 years later.

Literature of the U.S./Mexico Border
EN 390.01 - M/W/F 11:00-11:50 AM
Dr. Stephen Park

This course will explore the literature and culture of the borderland, from the violent creation of the US-Mexico border in 1848 to the present day. Throughout the semester, we will read a historical range of texts, almost exclusively written by Chicanx authors. We will consider how this body of literature has been shaped by the lived reality of the US/Mexico border, by the tension between English and Spanish, and by the lasting effects of internal colonialism. By examining more closely the poetry, fiction, and life writing produced in the borderlands, it becomes clear that this seemingly peripheral region is central to the United States and to the longer story of American Literature.

We will begin with a study of Gloria Anzaldúa’s foundational work, Borderlands/La Frontera in order to give us a theoretical lens through which to view the borderlands. We’ll then read early works of Chicanx Literature, such as María Ruíz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don and Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez, as well as works by contemporary authors, such as Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and Cormac McCarthy. This course will also consider how the US/Mexico border has been represented in film, television, and music.

This course counts toward the Minor in Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS). Participants in Loyola’s immersion program with the Kino Border Initiative are especially encouraged to enroll.

400-Level Courses

Seminar in Science and Literature: The Poetry of Evolution from Lucretius to Charles Darwin
EN 441.01 - M/W/F 1:00-1:50 PM
STAFF

Today, the sciences and humanities are much like Shakespeare’s disgruntled bedfellows, elbowing each other for space in the public sphere. Historically, however, there existed a symbiotic relationship between the two disciplines, such that in 1860 the English biologist T. H. Huxley could declare, “science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.” Poetry, in particular, helped to inspire some of the greatest works of science and literature. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, for instance, is an attempt to diagnose mental illness in an era before modern psychology, and Darwin’s discovery of natural selection might not have occurred had he not been reading Milton’s Paradise Lost, his favorite poem. Our task, then, over the course of the semester will be to recover the historical relationship between poetry and science and appreciate them as mutually galvanizing forces. Beginning with the ancient Greeks and Romans, and progressing forward to Shakespeare’s day, we will conclude with Darwin, Huxley, and the Victorians. From Lucretius the atomist to Darwin the evolutionist, we will develop a new understanding of the role of poetry in scientific inquiry, as well as consider the ways in which, even today, literature is still of value to the STEM fields, and vice versa.

Seminar in Victorian Literature: 19th Century Novels into Film
EN 463.01 - T/TH 4:30-5:45 PM
Dr. Gayla McGlamery

The 19th-century English novel and narrative film formed an early attraction at the turn of the century and quickly give birth to another form of truth-telling refracted through both word and lens—films adapted from 19th-century novels. In this course, we will read and discuss several wonderful 19th-century novels and view some films they have inspired. We will analyze these works from a variety of critical perspectives—our own and others’—including current film adaptation theory. Text and film adaptations may include Frankenstein; Love & Friendship and/or Sense and Sensibility; Jane Eyre and/or Wuthering Heights; Far from the Madding Crowd and/or The Mayor of Casterbridge; A Christmas Carol; and Dracula or The Invisible Man.

Students can expect lively discussions, class response papers, group oral presentations, and a documented final paper.

Seminar in Modern Literature: Modernist Poetry
EN 483.01 - T/TH 1:40-2:55 PM
Dr. Melissa Girard

The “Lost Generation,” Malcolm Cowley said, “belonged to a period of transition from values already fixed to values that had to be created.” This new generation of writers, artists, and activists, who came of age during World War I, published in little magazines like transition, Broom (to make a clean sweep of it), This Quarter (existing purely in the present), and Secession. “They were seceding from the old,” Cowley said, “and they groped their way toward another scheme of life, as yet undefined.”

This seminar will provide you with an opportunity to explore modernist poetry. We will read a large selection of poetry and prose by figures such as William Carlos Williams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Amy Lowell, and Marianne Moore, who were residing in New York City in the teens and twenties and helping to foment a revolution in both poetry and politics. We will also read writing by Americans abroad in Europe, including Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, H.D., and Gertrude Stein, to examine how their ideas were both co-opted and critiqued by poets in the U.S. By the end of the semester, you can expect to develop a much stronger understanding of these poets’ aesthetic innovations—poetic experiments such as Vorticism, Futurism, Imagism, Impersonality, Blues, and Jazz—as well as their political achievements. For this generation of artists, vers libre or “free verse” became the preferred vehicle for pursuing a freer world. Alongside modernism’s new aesthetics, their liberatory political campaigns—for racial, gender, class, and sexual equality—changed the course of the twentieth century.

This course does not require any previous background or expertise in modernist poetry—only a desire and willingness to explore these difficult and important works together. I hope you will join us!

Seminar in Contemporary Literature: Toni Morrison
EN 481.01—T/TH 9:25-10:40 AM
Dr. Gary Slack

In this seminar, we will read from across Toni Morrison's vast body of work. Although the readings are listed in chronological order, they consist of Morrison's well-known works (The Bluest Eye (1970), Song of Solomon (1977), Jazz (1992)) as well as her lesser-known works (The Black Book (1974), her introduction to The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978), Desdemona (2012). In reading these works, we hope to unravel the sense of memory (which Morrison refers to as "rememory") which literally haunts her narratives, not unlike the unnamed ghost that is Sethe's Beloved in her novel of the same name (1987). 

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. Forni 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.