Fall 2019 Graduate Courses

Instructor: Professor Theo Davis
Sequence: Thursday, 2:40-6:00 p.m.

Proseminar introduces the history and current scholarly practices of English studies. Surveys theoretical, methodological, and institutional issues in the development of the discipline; introduces students to the research of the English department’s graduate faculty; and offers opportunities for the practice of key components of scholarly production, including formulating research questions, using databases, conducting literature reviews, and writing and presenting scholarship in common formats other than the long research paper, such as conference proposals, oral presentations, and book reviews. Prereq. English degree students only.

See Spring 2020.

ENGL 7282 Topics in Renaissance Literature: Material Shakespeare, Agential Shakespeare, Sustainable Shakespeare

Instructor: Professor Erika Boeckeler
Sequence: Wednesday, 2:40-6:00 p.m.

Topic updated March 26, 2019. Description forthcoming.

ENGL 7351 Topics in Literary Studies: Realism in Victorian Literature

Instructor: Professor Laura Green
Sequence: Thursdays, 6-9 p.m.

The Victorian period is famously the height of realistic representation. In this seminar, we will explore the uses of realism in imaginative narrative, including the dramatic monologues of Tennyson and Browning and novels by Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy. Considering various ways that realism has been understood in theory and criticism over time, we will attend to narration and perspective, the shaping of subjectivity, agency, and autobiography in fiction; the effort of writers of realistic fiction to influence society, politics, and culture and to express philosophical and psychological innovations, such as relativism, positivism, and Darwinism.

See Spring 2020.

ENGL 7360 Topics in Rhetoric: Decolonial Theory and Practice

Instructor: Professor Ellen Cushman
Sequence: Monday, 2:40-6:00 p.m.

Decolonial theorist, Walter Mignolo, identifies a colonial matrix of power that shapes the modern world and that stems from imperialist legacies of Western thought. Beginning with this matrix, the course opens by locating ourselves as discursive subjects within the epistemic hierarchies sustaining this colonial matrix of power. How do our relative privileges connect to imperial legacies of knowing and being? With this understanding as a foundation, the second part of the course asks us to epistemically delink from the colonial matrix of power by learning to unlearn the ways in which we are written by imperial pasts. In what ways might the consumption and production of any aspect of our learned lives contribute to imperial legacies of power? The third part of the course introduces decolonial methods for creating knowledge to take up the questions: where else can the production of knowledge or education unfold? In what ways might we as scholars engage in decolonial knowledge making and as educators engage in decolonial teaching? The final part of the course takes up the imperative to create alternatives to modern thought. What projects might we propose to recuperate suppressed epistemologies or to imagine alternatives to the hierarchical structures of everyday life or to help our students learn to unlearn? Assignments will include origin(al) scholarship, object analyses, presentations, a proposal, and a project designed according to individual student interests.

ENGL 7392 Writing and the Teaching of Writing

Instructor: Professor Mya Poe
Sequence: Monday, 6:00-9:20 p.m.

This course prepares graduate students to teach writing at the university level, drawing on recent scholarship in rhetoric and writing studies as well as research in other fields into how people learn. We will explore various theories regarding the nature of writing, how people learn to write, and what kinds of environments and activities best help students learn writing. The goal is for each graduate student to use these theories to develop a coherent position on the teaching of writing, along with practical teaching materials that can be employed at Northeastern and elsewhere. Assignments will include an assignment analysis, a textbook review, an observation report, a policy analysis, and a teaching portfolio. Note: Required of first-year PhD students. MA students may enroll with permission of instructor.

See the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities or Graduate Certificate in Womens, Gender and Sexuality Studies websites for complete course lists and certificate information.