Fall 2026 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 2026

200-Level Courses

Majors Writers: Classical Myth
EN 211.01 - M/W/F 10:00-10:50 AM
Dr. Aaron Palmore

People turning into birds, flowers, and trees! Human hybrids like centaurs, harpies, and the one‐and‐only minotaur! We’ll see all this and more in our core text, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the unexpectedly epic poem written while Augustus was finalizing the transition of the Roman world from Republic to Empire. Ovid’s mythological compendium hangs together loosely as a narrative, but thematically it’s ultimately a poem about power: who gets it, how do they wield it, and what happens to those who suffer? We’ll spend one week on each of the 15 books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which will give us plenty of time to complement our reading with consideration of literary, artistic, and musical responses to the poem from the past 2000 years.

Comic Books as Literature, TV & Cinema
EN 220.01 - M/W 4:30-5:45 PM
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.

Afrofuturism
EN 222.01 – T/TH 1:40-2:55 PM
EN 222.02 – 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.

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
EN 280.02 - T/TH 10:50 AM-12:05 PM
Dr. Sondra Guttman 

“I’ll try and be what he loves to call me, ‘a little woman,’ and not be rough and wild; but do my duty here, instead of wanting to be somewhere else.” Louisa May Alcott 

How have young people in the U.S. challenged or confirmed conventional definitions of what’s normal as they navigate the path to adulthood?  How have the meanings and measures of childhood risk and freedom changed from the 19th to the 21st centuries?  We’ll examine these and other questions in readings about diverse characters striving for love, stability, and independence. By exploring the literature of growing up modern, we gain a richer understanding of our dynamic social environments and of human development and ability.  

This course fulfills your 200-level English or History core requirement. Work includes short essays, a group teaching experience, and projects that incorporate creative, analytical, and reflective elements.  

300-Level Courses

Shakespeare: Histories & 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.  

Book, Edition, Archive
EN 344.01 - T/TH 9:25-10:40 AM
Dr. Gary Slack 

Introduces collage manifestations in literature, including but not limited to: assemblage, découpé, found poetry, heteroglossia, and scrapbooking. Examines the collage as an artistic object (Zong!, M. NourbeSe Philip; The Soft Machine, William S. Burroughs; Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu) as well as a theoretical practice ("Discourse in the Novel," Mikhail Bakhtin; The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates; "Collage," Elizabeth Alexander). Students will submit a mix of academic and creative writing assignments to satisfy course requirements.

Jane Austen
EN 355.01 - T/TH 4:30-5:45 PM
Dr. Gayla McGlamery

Jane Austen turned 250 this past December 16th. While her novels were not bestsellers in her own time, from at least the late 19th-century to the early 21st, few author’s works have been so broadly embraced in popular culture as well as the academy. Austen’s alchemical combination of humor, social commentary, and romance has long attracted devoted fans and inspired countless imitators.

In this course, we’ll read portions of Austen’s letters and juvenilia, as well as the major novels. We’ll study the works within the historical context of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century reactions to revolutionary political and economic change and discuss the aspects of Austen’s style and subject matter that have made her works an enduring fascination for so many readers. Whether you’re a Janeite or simply Jane-curious, this course will have something for you. 

400-Level Courses

Honors Seminar Pre-1800: Reinventing Medieval
EN 430.01 - T/TH 1:40-2:55 PM
Dr. Kathleen Forni
By invitation only

In this course we’ll study how modern artists have adapted some medieval classics in order to render them palatable and relevant to modern audiences. To focus our comparative approach, we will use bits of adaptation theory, cultural studies, and medevialism (the study of how the Middle Ages is reimagined in contemporary culture). 

Medieval texts will include: Beowulf, Chretien de Troyes, Perceval, The Quest for the Grail, Dante’s Inferno, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and The Geste of Robin Hood. Modern versions will include: Gardner, Grendel; Niven and Pournelle, Inferno; Ishiguro, The Buried Giant as well as a few film adaptations.

Seminar in Early American Lit: Unsettling Early American Literature
EN 432.01 - M/W/F 1:00-1:50 PM
Dr. Stephen Park

Every year on March 25, people in our state observe Maryland Day, a holiday which, according to the state’s official website, commemorates the day in 1634 when the first “settlers” arrived. But what does it mean to settle a place? What do this word tell us about the people who arrived in America and the way they saw themselves? What do the narratives of settlement tell us about the people who were already there and then found themselves being “settled”? 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, Samson Occom, Phillis Wheatley, William Apess, and Catherine Maria Sedgwick. 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 and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis.

Seminar in African American Literature: 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.

Seminar in Modern Literature: Bohemianism
EN 483.01 - T/TH 3:05-4:20 PM
Dr. Melissa Girard 

“The grand work of Bohemianism in our own day in our United States, and the best proof of it, is the inability of the old-fogies to understand or see the meaning and tendency of our Bohemianism."
—D.D., The New York Saturday Press, June 16, 1860

Born in nineteenth-century Paris, bohemianism is a way of life, a philosophy based on rebellion from the mainstream. Disillusioned with conventional society, bohemians create alternative communities—subcultures—on the margins, where they may live and create art according to their own rules. Taking their cue from Paris and London, American bohemians in New York and San Francisco have given rise to some of the most innovative (and contentious) artistic experiments of the last 150 years, including modernism, feminism, and free love. This semester, we will immerse ourselves in the history and philosophy of bohemianism to understand the nature of their rebellions. Are bohemians really radicals or just pretenders? Our readings will begin with iconic bohemian works by Charles Baudelaire, Walt Whitman, and Oscar Wilde. We will then travel to New York’s Greenwich Village, where Edna St. Vincent Millay reimagined bohemia for the “New Woman”; Ernest Hemingway’s cosmopolitan bohemia, where the “Lost Generation” wandered aimlessly in the aftermath of World War I; Harlem’s cabarets, where jazz fueled new forms of artistic and political freedom; and San Francisco’s Beat subculture, where Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac popularized bohemianism like never before. We will analyze the forms and styles of art that arose from these bohemian subcultures and explore whether bohemianism offers a viable alternative to mainstream life.

Seminar in Film & Literature: Short Form Animation
EN 486.01 - W 6:00-8:30 PM
Dr. Nicholas Miller 

This course will explore short-form animation, a “hand-made,” craft-centered approach to visual art that focuses and intensifies meaning in a manner similar to—and different from—the literary short story. In considering animations of literary works by Dostoevsky, Kafka, Hans Christian Andersen, Emily Dickinson, Susanna Clarke, Diana Wynne Jones, Julio Cortazar, Eiko Kadono, Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. Le Guin, and others, we will explore what animation art has to teach us about the literary imagination.

Importantly, this is not an adaptation course. We will consider issues of visual translation, fidelity, and transformation, but our focus will be on exploring the influence of animation history on literary expression, examining animation’s often overlooked role in driving experiments with narrative, language, character development, and the use of metaphor.

Approaching literary texts through this atypical lens will enable us not only to appreciate them in new ways, but to understand how literary fiction works, in ways both similar to and different from other expressive forms.

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.