Department of English 2026-27 all upcoming graduate seminars

ENG 6302/6303: Professionalization Seminar

Taught by the Director of Graduate Studies

Fall 2026 and Winter 2027

Required courses for all PhD and MA students

This course is designed to help you develop the skills you need to succeed in graduate school and prepare for the next stage of your career after your degree, whether that’s in academia or outside of the university sector. The course consists of a series of workshops on various aspects of graduate studies, led in some cases by the Director of Graduate Studies and in others by English Department faculty members. Topics include: how to develop a healthy writing practice; how to conduct high-quality research and develop a personal knowledge management system; how to improve your teaching and marking skills as a TA or Corrector; how to apply for federal and provincial grants like SSHRC and OGS; how to publish your work in peer-reviewed journals; how to speak at academic conferences; and how to apply for jobs after your studies.

ENG 6304: Critical Methodologies in Literary Studies

Professor Kimberly Quiogue Andrews

Fall 2026

Required course for all PhD students, as well as most MA students completing a Thesis or a Major Research Project

This is a course in a kind of thinking usually labelled “theory,” which often, at first, sounds intimidating and like something you might not know how to read or do. However, in Professing Literature, Gerald Graff makes the point that “there is a sense in which all teachers of literature are ‘theorists’ and have a stake in theoretical disputes” (2). This course builds on Graff’s argument that theory—the study of what literature and literary language is, and the application of conceptual frameworks from other disciplines like psychology or cultural studies to literary texts—is relevant to everyone who studies or even just enjoys literature. You will be part of a group with diverse and varied interests, and everyone will find some or all of the readings quite challenging. One primary goal of the course is to increase your confidence as we work through the texts together. Over the course of the semester, we will develop a working familiarity with a selection of major theoretical texts, concepts, and debates that have shaped the field of literary studies; we will explore what scholars in our field have found helpful, interesting, and/or problematic about each text; and we will practice approaching unfamiliar texts and ideas with curiosity, patience, and an open mind.

The following is a selection of texts recently covered in this class. Keep in mind that this list is only an example, and the reading list is subject to change.

John Guillory, Professing Criticism
Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”
Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”
Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn
Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View”
Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings
Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

ENG 6310: Medieval Manuscript Studies

Professor Andrew Taylor

Fall 2026

How do you read an old manuscript? How do you find your way through an archive? This course will provide some preliminary answers, introducing you to the experience of working with a range of medieval and early modern books and documents. We will consider how works were composed, copied, and annotated, how they have been and can be transcribed and edited, the challenges they present, at a material level, to modern scholars, and their shifting institutional context, from the medieval monastery or college library to the renaissance library to the modern library to the internet. The class will visit Archives and Special Collections (ARCS) in Morisset Library and the Lowy collection in the National Archives.

ENG6330: Seventeenth-Century Verse: Poetics, Learning, and Faith

Professor Victoria Burke

Fall 2026 or Winter 2027

This course examines a substantial corpus of poetry from five different seventeenth-century poets: Anne Southwell, John Donne, George Herbert, Hester Pulter, and John Milton.The verse will be analyzed from many perspectives, including in relation to form and aesthetics, materiality, and intellectual formation.The course begins with a reading of the works of Southwell, which include social poetry addressed to friends and superiors, elegies, poems of invective and defence, songs and sonnets, and digressive poetry on the ten commandments.Using the professor’s forthcoming edition (co-edited with Danielle Clarke and Christina Luckyj), students will explore Southwell’s formally and rhetorically complex poetry, her extensive learning in natural philosophy and theology, and the manuscript record of her unprinted works.We will also read a large number of poems by the dazzling, so-called “metaphysical” poet, Donne, in all of the major genres in which he wrote: satires, elegies, verse letters, songs and sonnets, and divine poems.Herbert’s religious lyrics, revered for centuries for their piety and experimental poetics, will also form part of the course, as will a consideration of Donne as a manuscript writer and Herbert as an author known primarily in print.The recently discovered manuscript poetry of Hester Pulter (120 poems and poetic emblems) will be another core set of readings, as we explore this immensely learned, poetically skilled, and politically engaged voice.Finally, we will study Milton’s great religious epic, Paradise Lost, appreciating its poetic virtuosity and its theological engagements.Analysis of recent scholarship will be paired with extensive close reading of the poetry.

Texts:

Anne Southwell’s Works, edited by Victoria E. Burke, Danielle Clarke, and Christina Luckyj, forthcoming with The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, University of Chicago Press (draft edition).

John Donne’s Poetry.Edited by Donald R. Dickson, Norton, 2007.

George Herbert: 100 Poems.Edited by Helen Wilcox, Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Milton, John.Paradise Lost.Edited by Abraham Stoll, Broadview Press, 2023.

The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making.General editors Leah Knight and Wendy Wall, Northwestern University, https://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/

ENG 6360: Maker Lit

Professor Sara Landreth

Fall 2026 or Winter 2027

What makes a maker? This graduate seminar explores the literary, cultural, and intellectual history of maker-cultures from 1600 to the present day. As we read autobiographies and diaries by artists and craftspeople as well as “how-to” manuals for hobbyists, we will trace the often-blurry boundaries between professional and amateur. (The Latin root amator, after all, implies someone who makes “for the love of it.”) How did writers in the past define the differences between making with words (“wordsmithing”) and making with our hands? What is the history of the distinction between art and crafts, and how did traditionally “feminine” pursuits get relegated to the latter? If the so-called “rise” of the middle classes can’t account for the explosion of books and supplies for amateurs between 1750 and 1850, what other factors were at play?

We will not only be thinking about making but also making in order to think. Students will explore new scholarly practices—some borrowed from the fields of experimental archaeology and art restoration—that encourage 21^st-century researchers to follow historical “how-to” instructions to re-create (or re-make) recipes or crafts from the past.

Controversies about technology and human creativity are nothing new: in the early 1800s, critics of the new photographic cameras worried that drawing and painting skills would go extinct. Today, human creativity confronts another seismic shift. Big Tech seems ready to throw makers to the lions. When Meta recently announced that every piece of art ever posted on Instagram will be fed to artificial intelligence, digital ethicists argued that much more than intellectual property is at stake.Many of our readings address ouruniquely human processes of feeling while making. Making is fun, but it is also hard, often painfully so. But ChatGPT doesn’t feel anything when it generates visual or verbal art. For A.I., making is easy. And trading sweat for ease, as the history of maker-cultures suggests, might be a pact to sell our souls.

The Course Reader includes excerpts from the following:

Ackermann, “On Fancywork”
Adamson, “The Case for Material Intelligence”
Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
Constable, Memoirs of John Constable
Cozens, “A New Method of…Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape”
Gandee, The Artist or Young Ladies’ Instructor
Gilpin, Essay on Landscape Sketching
Hessel, The Story of Art Without Men
Hilliard, The Arte of Limning
Reynolds, Discourses on Art
Sennett, The Craftsman
Smith, From Lived Experience to the Written Word
Vigée Le Brun, Memoirs of Madame Le Brun
Wigston-Smith, Novels, Needlework, and Empire

ENG732X: The Underground Railroad: Depictions and Documents

Professor Jennifer Blair

Fall 2026 or Winter 2027

This course examines “the underground railroad” as a socio-political movement, an illegal transportation infrastructure, an imagined space, and a historical moment documented in surviving archival objects and intangible cultural memory. The underground railroad was a coordinated effort by radical activists to help people—specifically people racialized as Black who had been forced into slavery by birth or capture—move undetected across expanses of territory to places where they could not be recaptured (including Canada and Mexico). In this course we will examine mainly Black-authored narratives and other historical, fictional, autobiographical, and filmic accounts of the underground railroad. Text selections feature authors who were living in Canada or who spent a significant amount of time in Canada West (Ontario) or working with activists and organizers in Canada. We will also study efforts to organize these and other records into a coherent history (for example nineteenth-century books by William Still, William M. Mitchell, and Wilbur Siebert). We will also read contemporary scholarship that considers these efforts to narrate and historicize the moment alongside newly developed methods in Black Print Culture Studies and Black Bibliography. For example, we will engage with Autumn Womack’s assertion that Still’s “formal innovations” in The Underground Railroad Records “provide the workings of a Black historiographicalmethod” and Lara Langer Cohen’s recent book Going Underground (Duke UP, 2023). We will also examine contemporary renderings of the underground railroad, including Colson Whitehead’s speculative novel based on Still’s 1872 book, Canadian author Kai Thomas’s In the Upper Country, and Kasi Lemmon’s 2019 film Harriet.

Course Texts:

William Still, The Underground Railroad Records (1872)

Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (2016)

Kai Thomas, In the Upper Country (2023)

Ismael Reed, Flight to Canada (1976)

Kasi Lemmons, Dir., Harriet (2019)

Josiah Henson, The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada,

as Narrated by Himself (1849)

Henry Box Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown (1851)

Lewis and Milton Clarke, Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke (1846)

Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (1853)

William M. Mitchell, The Under-Ground Railroad (1860)

Wilbur Sieburt, The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (1898) (selections)

ENG7381: On Beauty: Aesthetic Theory in the Modern World

James Brooke-Smith

Spring 2027

What happened to beauty?

The concept of beauty has been central to aesthetics and art theory since classical antiquity. In the works of Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Kant and countless others, the experience of beauty was given a special significance in human life as a concomitant of morality, justice, divinity, or knowledge. As many critics have pointed out, however, beauty’s special status has been thrown into question in the modern era. Modern sceptics claim that beauty distracts us from more pressing matters of social and political concern; that the experience of beauty is a form of ideological mystification that falsifies the real conditions of our existence; that judgments of taste are merely the product of our subjective opinions and cultural prejudices; that beauty is simply one value among many, taking its place alongside the kitsch, the camp, the cute, the cool, etc. in the consumer marketplace.

In this class we will investigate the changing status of beauty in classical and modern aesthetics. In order to do so, we will focus our reading on three areas: 1) foundational texts in philosophical aesthetics by Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Hume, Kant, etc.; 2) modern critiques and defenses of the beautiful by authors such as Theodor Adorno, Susan Sontag, Elaine Scarry, and Alexander Nehamas; 3) works of art and literature that dramatize the vicissitudes of aesthetic experience in the modern world by authors such as Oscar Wilde, Thomas Mann, Zadie Smith, Andrej Tarkovsky, and Alfonso Cuaron.

Some of the questions we will consider include:

Does beauty retain a moral force in modern culture?
Is the beautiful one or many things?
Are some aesthetic judgments universalizable?
Can we be right or wrong about what is beautiful?
What does neuroscience tell us about aesthetic experience?

ENG738X: “First Personalism” and the Novel

Professor Lauren Gillingham

Fall 2026 or Winter 2027

Description

Arguably since Jane Austen honed the narrative technique known as free indirect discourse, the novel has been the go-to literary genre for rendering the tension between individual perspective and perception, on the one hand, and the external world, or a social reality outside the self, on the other. Critics argue that the novel taught readers how to understand themselves as uniquely feeling, perceiving beings, in possession of an interiority which is now the hallmark of the modern individual. Neither the concept of interiority, nor the premise of an objective narrative perspective, however, has remained stable through the novel’s long history. Indeed, the novel’s formal resources have developed unevenly, sometimes prioritizing individual consciousness, sometimes questioning the reality of the so-called external world, and sometimes taking issue with the genre itself.

This course will trace a history of narrative innovation with perspective, voice, and character from Austen to Rachel Cusk, paying attention along the way to key examples, including Woolf’s restriction of narrative perspective to the individual perceiving consciousness, Hurston’s exploration of the impediments to a unified consciousness under systemic racism, and Burns’s depersonalizing of character into a network of social and geopolitical relations. Most recently, writers such as Cusk have pressed against the boundary between fiction and autobiography, throwing out the idea of a cohesive narrative consciousness and questioning whether anything about the novel – character, plot, perception, expression – can be certain anymore. These recent developments in the genre have prompted at least one critic to decry the “first personalism” flowing from social-media culture into fiction, and swamping the mediating power and collective consciousness that an historical notion of narrative perspective was seen to afford. Taking in this genre history from our twenty-first-century perspective, we will consider, among other things, the vicissitudes of narrative style, the function and effect of the speaking “I,” the rendering of voice and consciousness, and the contested boundary between fiction and reality.

Tentative text list

Fiction

Jane Austen, Emma

Anna Burns, Milkman

Rachel Cusk, Outline

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zadie Smith, On Beauty

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

Theory

Timothy Bewes, Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age

Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism

D.A. Miller, Jane Austen, or, The Secret of Style

ENG7375: Literary Misanthropy

Professor Emelia Quinn

Fall 2026 or Winter 2027

Misanthropy is on the rise. Human-hating appears as a dominant structure of feeling in the contemporary moment, where the awareness of living in the Anthropocene seems to increasingly result in the resolve that the earth would be better off without us. As such, it seems more important than ever to understand the history of misanthropy and to critically interrogate the limits as well as the critical possibilities of the misanthropic position. This course traces an extended history of literary misanthropy, from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens (1623)to Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos (1985), and from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726)to Olga Tockarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009, trans. 2018). In addition, students will engage with key works of misanthropic philosophy, such as the pessimism of Alfred Schopenhauer, as well as emergent off-shoots of misanthropic thinking in contemporary theory, including the relationship of misanthropy to the anti-social turn in queer theory, the misanthropic tenor of Afropessimist theory, and the growth of anti-natalist reflections in ecocriticism. We will consider how misanthropy functions across varied historical and national contexts and its frequent association with pernicious eugenic logics. In the process, students will explore the contradictions, paradoxes, and even comedy of the misanthropic position, and consider how we think of ourselves as human while grappling with our complicity and culpability in systems of oppression.

ENG732X: Awake in the Red Desert: Canadian Poetry in the 1960s

Professor Robert Stacey

Summer 2027

Is there a period in North American culture more romanticized and less understood than the 1960s? Accessed through recycled images of hippies and ‘flower people,’ it exists in the popular imagination as a time of free love, radical politics, and bell-bottomed trousers. (Go to any ‘60s-themed event and you’ll know what I mean.) But this representation is a mere simulacrum and pastiche, something based more on our current desires and anxieties than on any real engagement with the history and culture of the time. It's also safe to say that it’s a peculiarly American image, an image so powerful it has successfully colonized the imaginations of Canadians for whom the 1960s is more likely to recall the Vietnam War than the FLQ.

Featuring representative poetry collections and small press publications published in Canada between 1959 and 1972, along with readings in history and cultural theory, this course has two aims: (1) to complicate and to “Canadianize” students’ understanding of “the ‘60s” and (2) to explore debates and developments in poetic practice in Canada in the period. It is a cliché of Canadian literary studies—but a true one—that the 1960s were a period of great enthusiasm in the arts: fueled by nationalist fervour and anti-imperialist sentiment (even as it continued to be influenced by international and American literary experiments) Canadian literature, as Nick Mount has put it, “arrived” during the period. The formal establishment ofCanadian literature as an academic field followed soon after, and it relied heavily on 60’s work as both source material and ideological support for its disciplinary self-imaginings.

Notwithstanding the swift canonization of 60s poetry, it is also true that the 1960s represents the last period in which poets and poetry played a significant role in defining Canadian culture outside the academy.As such, our focus on poetry of the period affords an opportunity to think through the complex relationship between poetic doing, poetic saying, and nationalist feeling.

Tentative List of Primary Texts

Irving Layton, A Red Carpet for The Sun (1959)
Leonard Cohen, Spice Box of Earth (1961)
Phyllis Webb, Naked Poems (1965)
Al Purdy, The Cariboo Horses (1965)
Gwendolyn MacEwan, A Breakfast for Barbarians (1966)
Roe Rosenblatt, The LSD Leacock (1966)
Dorothy Livesay, The Unquiet Bed (1967)
bill bissett, Awake in th Red Desert (1968)
Margaret Atwood, The Animals in that Country (1968)
Alden Nowlan, The Mysterious Naked Man (1969)
The Cosmic Chef, ed. bpNichol (1970)
New Wave Canada: The New Explosion in Canadian Poetry, ed. Raymond Souster
1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference audio and photo archive
Selected issues of TISH magazine (1961-1969)

Plus selected critical texts.

ENG731X: Disability and American Literature

Professor Thomas Allen

Fall 2026 or Winter 2027

This course will explore representations of disability in American literary works from the nineteenth century to the present. We will survey how literature has contributed to changing conceptions of disability over time as part of larger cultural shifts while also attending to the complex and often contradictory representations within individual literary texts. The various kinds of disability we will encounter include physical, sensory, mental, and developmental, all of which we will seek to understand within the context of major historical events such as the Civil War, the rise of medical psychiatry, and the movement for disability rights. Our literary readings will be placed in conversation with scholarship and theory from the broad field of disability studies as well as critical studies of specific authors and works. This scholarship will help us attend to the connections between disability and forms of identity such as socioeconomic class, gender, race, and sexual orientation. Authors studied will include Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Charles Chesnutt, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, M. Scott Momaday, Audre Lorde, and others.