Literature Courses

001 In Person
Tue/Thu | 11:00AM-12:15PM
Instructor: Kyle DiRoberto

This seminar examines how early modern drama staged marriage and the family as sites of comedy, conflict, and control. We will read across genres, from the domestic tragedy of The Winter’s Tale to the dynastic tensions of King Leir, and from Lyly’s comedies of wit and disguise to Middleton and Dekker’s city comedies. Plays such as The Taming of a Shrew and The Roaring Girl will allow us to consider how questions of contract, consent, gender roles, and household authority were dramatized in both serious and playful ways.

The course also investigates the theatrical and institutional frameworks in which these dramas were created and performed. We will consider the role of playing companies such as the Queen’s Men, the economic record-keeping of Philip Henslowe, and the cultural reach of actors like Edward Alleyn. Collaborative writing and the circulation of anonymous plays will be treated as central forces in shaping how marriage and the family appeared on stage.

Students will engage primary texts in conjunction with archival and digital resources such as EEBO, LION, and REED. We will also examine the role of artificial intelligence in Shakespeare and early modern drama studies, considering both its methodological possibilities and its potential dangers. Research projects will emphasize close reading as well as archival or digital methods, inviting students to contribute to ongoing debates about how early modern drama imagined and contested marriage and the family.

001 In Person
Mon | 3:30PM-6:00PM
Instructor: Scott Selisker

This course will introduce students to major texts and current critical methods in 20th-century U.S. literary studies, with a focus on the novel and prose nonfiction. We’ll cover texts and authors on the MA reading list while surveying recent scholarship that will provide models for doctoral-level research questions and methods. We’ll place some emphasis on the twentieth-century traditions of creative nonfiction as they bear on fiction, but the course will also provide a firm foundation in major movements, periods, and topics in the field.

001 In Person
Thu | 3:30PM-6:00PM
Instructor: John Mellilo

In this co-convened class, we will examine contemporary poetry (roughly poetry of the last 50 years) through the varieties of sonic experimentation that poets bring to their work. We will read and listen to poetry in a variety of forms, from radical free verse on the page to song forms recorded completely off the page. Through the methodological and theoretical lens of sound studies, we will analyze how contemporary technology and media transform how poets listen to and sound out language. Potential genres and schools for our investigations include: Later Modernist poetry, ,New York School poetry, Language poetry, popular song (particularly punk rock and indie songwriting), rap and hip-hop, conceptual poetry, and recent “hybrid” poetries existing between different genres and forms of performance. 

001 In Person
Tue | 3:30PM-6:00 PM
Instructors: Drs. Steph Brown (English/SBS) and Harris Kornstein (Public and Applied Humanities/COH)

Being surveilled is one of modernity’s quintessential experiences, however, the techniques and effects of surveillance are often felt differently across diverse populations. In recent decades, surveillance studies has emerged as a field that theorizes surveillance across the disciplinary boundaries of the social sciences, humanities, computer/data sciences, and fine arts. This course offers students an overview, emphasizing cultural studies methodologies and questions of social (in)justice. Early weeks will focus on the origins of surveillance as practices of population management under capitalist regimes, using works by Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and Cedric Robinson. Latter weeks will be organized topically around how race, gender, geography, class, visuality, citizenship, secularism, sexuality, and computational technologies and data analytics shape cultural and political narratives around surveillance. The course will also consider how the surveillance of Black, anti-colonial, and queer cultures is encoded in cultural production by these groups—including creative techniques for evading and countering observation.

 The course will include 4 public talks by visiting surveillance studies scholars and artists—speakers to be announced. 

“How to graduate-student.” This colloquium meets every other week, and it is a requirement for first year students. Our meetings will include information about the program, an introduction to the profession, and tips on navigating graduate student life.

This workshop meets every other week. We will discuss career paths and goals, prepare application materials, and learn about different approaches to the process of going “on the market.”

005 In Person
Time TBD
Instructor: John Melillo

This writing workshop is for students who are ABD and who are at any stage of their dissertation writing. Whether you are working on your initial proposal or your final chapter, we will meet once a week to discuss writing strategies, workshop chapters or sections, and create accountability for your writing goals.