2026-2027 Graduate Seminars: Draft List
This is a preview of the courses we are considering for next year. Course offerings will be finalized by the end of January 2026.
ENGL 811 Psychoanalysis and Culture
Instructor: Angela Facundo
Since its inception, psychoanalysis has experienced an oscillating and ambivalent reception, but its impact on culture is unequivocal. The unconscious, the Oedipus Complex, the fetish – these are the kinds of psychoanalytic concepts that gained steam in the cultural imaginary, giving birth to clichés and psychical insights alike. This course begins with Freud and traces how psychoanalytic discourse evolves through conceptual and methodological disagreements. We will explore intersections between psychoanalysis and twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, visual art, and film. We will explore themes such as repetition, rupture, eroticism, horror, abjection, dreams, play, love, and hate.
ENGL 816 The Novel in the Anthropocene
Instructor: Adeline Johns-Putra
Although geologists have rejected the proposal that we are living in a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene, the word nonetheless designates an awareness that humans’ profound effect on the planet is overwhelmingly that of damage and discord of its ecosystems and organisms. How, then, do we frame narratives that disabuse humans of their long-held fantasy of species exceptionalism, but that at the same time deploy and re-centre human response and responsibility as the most obvious solution to the Anthropocene’s ecological emergencies? This class is concerned with the place of that ubiquitous narrative mode—the novel—in the Anthropocene. Specifically, it asks if the novel is adequate to the representational and ethical dilemmas of the Anthropocene, and it examines contemporary novels that grapple with this question. We will discuss issues such as: setting and scale (from the human-sized to the planetary, from the day-to-day to the longue durée to the geological epoch); perspective, voice, and reader empathy (if the moral dilemma at the heart of the Anthropocene is how to de-centre and re-centre human agency, how can novels cultivate a diffused, non-anthropocentric point-of-view?); and the boundaries between politics and didactics, literature and public service messaging (after all, is there really any moral obligation for novels to make us feel, think, and act differently in a time of environmental emergency?).
ENGL 817 Publishing Practicum
This seminar takes students through revision and submission stages from draft essay to article publication. The first section of the course will be devoted to discussion of the differences between coursework papers and published articles, and to a presentation and peer revision cycle of each student’s work. The second section of the course will discuss how to decide where to send article submissions, how to present them, and what to expect of the process. If there is time, we will build in a conference proposal/presentation stage. Students must have a complete draft essay to bring to the start of the course and be ready to welcome reading and response from peers. Success in the course requires regular attendance, constructive participation, revision responsive to instructor and peer review, and submission to an appropriate scholarly venue for publication.
ENGL 824 King Arthur: Medieval to Modern
Instructor: Ruth Wehlau
This course will examine a selection of Arthurian texts, beginning with the earliest Welsh legends and then following the tradition into the present day. Works to be read include selections from major interpreters of the legend over a period of 900 years, including Geoffrey of Monmouth, Sir Thomas Malory, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and T. H. White. Apart from these better-known writers, many other authors and poets have employed Arthurian themes and narratives in their work. Students will be asked to research some of these works and to choose a few to include in the course. Ultimately we will piece together a history of the tradition that includes a variety of high cultural and popular interpretations of the narrative over time. Throughout the course, we will return to the following central questions: What cultural purposes do myths of King Arthur serve? Whose values do they reflect? To what extent do they engage with the early medieval past, and to what extent with the concerns of their later interpreters?
ENGL 826 Premodern Gender and Sexuality
Instructor: Margaret Pappano
This course explores Medieval and Early Renaissance constructions of gender and sexuality, seeking to locate both continuities and discontinuities with modern conceptions and practices. While labels such as “gay,” “lesbian,” “genderqueer,” “transgender” did not exist in premodernity, nonetheless people imagined and engaged in types of gender shifting and polymorphous modes of desire that help us to understand the necessity for labile terminology to describe premodern gendered and sexual practices. Examining traditions from Medieval and Early Modern Europe but with some exploration of the Islamic Middle East, this course considers how various aspects of premodern culture, such as religion, celibacy, knighthood, courtly culture, marriage, class hierarchy, economics, crossdressing, etc. shaped notions of gender and sexuality. Though examining theological, medical, and legal writings, moral guidebooks, hagiography, visual images, romance and other literary texts, this course will engage material from the early Middle Ages to early Renaissance period in dialogue with contemporary theoretical writing to attempt to articulate specificities of the premodern sex/gender system.
ENGL 841 Epistolarity in the Eighteenth Century
Instructor: Leslie Ritchie
You’ve got mail! The trope of a bag of letters opened to the reader’s gaze is surprisingly common in eighteenth-century literature. This course looks at a selection of eighteenth-century letters, letter-writing manuals, and fictions and dramas that depend upon letters to examine what makes epistolary form so fascinating. Texts will include works by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett, and others.
ENGL 842 Literature in the Age of Sensibility and the Sublime
Instructor: Christopher Fanning
The great neoclassical satirists Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift died in 1744 and 1745, respectively. The passing of these writers, who had defined the forms and standards of literary expression for decades, marked a watershed in English poetry: “For who durst now to poetry pretend?” asked one anonymous writer in 1744. This course will examine the attempts of later eighteenth-century authors to fill this perceived void on their own terms. Rather than continue to emulate the traditional ideals of Augustan Rome, authors of the 1740s and subsequent decades sought to cultivate native British traditions, to define themselves against Pope in particular, and to define an aesthetic in tune with human emotion and the natural world, redefining and revaluing concepts of fancy and imagination, reorganizing the canon of English authors, elevating genres such as the lyric (the ode) and the novel.
ENGL 856 The Nineteenth-Century Tale of Terror
Instructor: Robert Morrison
“Moralists have always wondered helplessly why Poe’s morbid tales need have been written,” wrote D. H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923). “Because,” he replied, “old things need to die and disintegrate, because the old white psyche has to be gradually broken down before anything else can come to pass....And it is a painful, sometimes ghastly process.” This course investigates nineteenth-century gothic and its preoccupation with violence, history, confession, property, addiction, kinship, subjectivities, sexuality, and the aristocracy. Authors to be considered include Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Brontë, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Joseph Conrad.
ENGL 857 Victorian Music Hall
Instructor: S. Brooke Cameron
This course will take you deep into the wonderful world of the late-Victorian Music Hall, a world of popular entertainment often mixed with subversive class and sexual critique. This is the world wherein drag performances and comic musicals use ribaldry and gallows humour to poke fun at – if not outright challenge – the stuffy conventions of dominant middle-class morality. In this course, we will also consider how those middle-class values (via investors and managers) do eventually make their way into, and perhaps foretell the decline, of this once immensely popular form of entertainment. The course will approach the Victorian Music Hall from a variety of angles or avenues, so to speak. In order to learn about the different venues as well as the class and social dynamics within this culture, we will begin by introducing ourselves to some of the legendary actors within this history, including Arthur Lloyd, Harry Champion, Marie Lloyd, Vesta Tilly, and Dan Leno. Some of the scripts we will read and compare concern figures who continue to be popular today (such as Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and Christmas Carol) while others will definitely be new and Victorian-specific (including The Phantom, Jesse Brown, Animal Magnetism, or Barnby Rudge). We will also spend time listening to and unpacking original recordings of Victorian Music Hall songs, such as “boiled Beef and Carrots” performed by Champion, “The Tower of London” performed by Leno, and “Burlington Bertie from Bow” performed by Ella Shield, etc. We will also consider the legacy of the Victorian Music Hall, from its transformation into more vanilla-ish variety acts, as well as its visible presence in inheritors like modern drag shows and pantomime theatre.
ENGL 858 Middlemarch and the Utopian Impulse
Instructor: Ronjaunee Chatterjee
This course will center theories of utopia anchored in a long reading of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Famously a “no place,” utopian thinking crosses literature, design and architecture, politic theory, film and art. We will use Middlemarch—in which utopian ideas arrive via glimmers and potentialities in the text—to think carefully about utopia’s relationship to realism. We will read criticism and theory by Marx, Adorno and Ernst Bloch, Anahid Nersessian, Gary Wilder, José Esteban Muñoz to additionally consider the place of utopian thought for the present.
ENGL 862 Woolf, Eliot, and Shakespeare
Instructor: Gabrielle McIntire
T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf were highly experimental avant-garde modernist writers who changed ideas both about what could be written about and how one could write. At the same time, Eliot and Woolf include explicit traces from a wide range of prior literature through their generous use of intertextuality and allusion. One of the foremost presences in both of their works is William Shakespeare. Texts will likely include Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Orlando, and A Room of One’s Own; T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land; and Shakespeare’s As You Like It, The Tempest, Cymbeline, and Hamlet.
ENGL 863 Arts – Design – Entertainment
Instructor: Glenn Willmott
This course will take us on a whirlwind tour across the jagged landscapes of modernist innovation, both avant-garde and popular—taking in literary fiction, poetry, drama, pulp genres (crime, science fiction and fantasy), comic strips and books, visual arts and architecture, fashion and design, music and dance. Our starting point will be current debates about the scope and meaning of the term modernism, followed by an exploration of its diverse formal experiments and social and intellectual concerns in the first half of the twentieth century.
ENGL 865 Data-ism
Instructor: Molly Wallace
It would be difficult to understand the present without recourse to the concept of “data.” “Data” is everywhere and at all scales. It defines our understanding of the planet and its climate crises; it circulates between countries in innumerable forms, from currencies to memes; it affects every profession and field; it shapes what we eat, how we sleep, what we wear; it affects our senses of ourselves as individuals and collectives. As Noah Yuval Harari has argued, we are witnessing a “shift in authority in almost all fields of human activity.” If we once looked to a God in “the clouds” for authoritative guidance, we are increasingly now looking for such guidance in “the Cloud,” as algorithms, guided by data, seem to know us, “even better than we know ourselves.” (The recent advent of AI “Jesus” in a church in Switzerland is surely this moment’s apotheosis.) This course will attempt to come to terms with this new faith, reading both popular nonfiction (like Harari’s Homo Deus) and fiction (may include Eggers’ The Circle, Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Powers’ The Overstory, Okorafor’s Death of the Author, or Wilson’s Robopocalypse). Throughout, we will ask what role literary studies might have in a data-driven world. Students should expect to read extensively, participate actively, and write independently (without the “aid” of AI).
ENGL 866 Contemporary Autobiography
Instructor: Yaël Schlick
This course will explore autobiographical writing in the 20th and 21st centuries. Readings will include theoretical discussions of the genre and the reading of a variety of autobiographical narratives.
ENGL 871 Climate Crisis Literature Written in Canada
Instructor: Petra Fachinger
This seminar will be concerned with contemporary texts written in Canada that discuss the physical, political, social, and cultural impacts of climate change on specific Canadian regions and populations. While the focus will be on the Canadian context, as the climate crisis affects Canada in unique ways, we will consider diverse and wide-ranging literary responses to climate change in a variety of modes and genres, including the novel, poetry, memoir, and drama. As the texts demonstrate, the discussion of climate emergency is inseparable from issues of social and racial justice and achieving Indigenous climate justice. Climate crisis literature ultimately asks for a necessary cultural shift to help save the planet. Our discussion will be informed by various ecocritical approaches, environmental justice studies, and the intersections between environmental humanities and Indigenous studies.
ENGL 873 Hockey, Social Justice, and Cultural Production
Instructor: Sam McKegney
The game of hockey has a steady grip on the Canadian national imaginary. According to literary scholar Jason Blake, “hockey envelops us like second-hand smoke, and, some would argue, it is just as dangerous because it beclouds other cultural options or more serious issues” (4). The game has been conceived as a breeding ground for social cohesion and civic virtue, as a source of national unity and pride, and, in poet Richard Harrison’s words, as a tool with which to make meaning out of winter. Yet the dominant mythologies that paint hockey as binding Canadians both to each other and to the landscape they/we inhabit serve simultaneously to entrench often problematic paradigms of gender, sexuality, race, and language that exclude as well as include. This course interrogates the role of hockey in supporting and disrupting discourses of Canadian nationhood; it examines how depictions of the country’s national winter sport serve to police Canadian identity by characterizing certain behaviours and traits as licit and desirable and others as illicit and aberrant. We will consider topics like gender, sexuality, nationalism, embodiment, play, mentorship, economics, regionalism, environmentalism, militarism, and violence by studying novels, poetry, life-writings, media representations, song lyrics, and films in which hockey plays a significant role.
ENGL 884 Race, Repertoire, Archive
Instructor: Kristin Moriah
Black feminist scholar Jennifer L. Morgan has explained that “the archive carries ‘the force of law,’ and through the conservation of documents and evidence it is situated at the intersection where change and stasis meet—it is both ‘revolutionary and traditional.’ ” In this course, we will tarry a while at the juncture of change and stasis. We will attempt to mine the relationship between Black Studies, Black literary criticism, and the archive. We will take for granted that the history of the Black diaspora is written corporally and textually. How, then, do archival theories and practices supplement interdisciplinary modes of knowing and reading or illuminate issues like embodiment, performance, and representation? How have Black writers and theorists mined the archives, and what might we learn from them? To answer these questions, we will turn to the work of Michel-Rolph Troulliot, M. NourbeSe Philip, Saidyah Hartman, Robert Reid-Pharr, C. Riley Snorton, and others. We will speak to archivists and theorists whose work is informed by Black archival practices.
