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Please note: courses may be subject to cancellation or modification. Consult the timetables and course descriptions for cancellations or changes, including times and locations.
Graduate students from other departments at U of T are welcome to enrol in ENG courses without completing a course add form. Non-ENG students should check with their home department to confirm if a course add form is required.
2025-2026 F/S/Y Graduate Course Offerings
Beneath these course offerings, please find separate timetables for F (first-term), S (second-term), and Y (year-long) courses.
ENG1001HF
Old English I
Trilling, R.
Term: F-TERM (September to December 2025)
Date/Time: Tuesday 10:00 - 12:00 (2 Hours) & Thursday 11:00 - 12:00 (1 Hour)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
Old English is the language spoken and written in England between roughly 500 and 1100 AD, and it offers a window to the past through a wide range of beautiful and evocative texts. In this course, you will encounter the very oldest English literature in its original form—the tales of kings, battles, heroes, monsters, and saints that have inspired writers from John Milton to J.R.R. Tolkien. Because Old English is almost like a foreign language to Modern English speakers, the course will begin with intensive work on the basics of Old English grammar and translation practice before we move on to more in-depth study of the literature and culture of early medieval England.
Course Reading List:
- Peter Baker, Introduction to Old English, 3rd edition, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
- Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge, The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, 2nd edition, Cambridge UP, 2013.
- Jacqueline Stodnick and Renée R. Trilling, A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies, Blackwell, 2012.
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Quizzes and Homework - 10%
- Daily Preparation and Translation - 30%
- Paleography Assignment - 20%
- Two Unit Exams - 20%
- Cumulative Exam - 20%
ENG1100HS
Dark Canada
Mount, N.
Term: S-TERM (January to April 2026)
Date/Time: Monday 10:00 - 12:00 (2 Hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
This seminar studies a selection of Canadian fiction from the dark, experimental, controversial, and just plain strange side of its spectrum, starting with a short novel from the 1940s whose author’s mother burned every copy she could find and ending with a love story from the 2020s about gay sex with Christ. Besides acquainting ourselves with some of the bravest and weirdest books Canada has produced, we will explore together the definition of the terms used to describe its texts, words like “experimental” and “controversial.” What makes a book controversial? Are there limits to what fiction can do or say? Should there be? How do we talk about and teach difficult stories? Where and how do “difficult” and “strange” fit into Canada’s literary history and our cultural imagination? Also, why on earth would anyone want to have sex with a bear?
Course Reading List:
- Warren Motte, “Experimental Writing, Experimental Reading,” Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature 42.2 (2010): 1-13; André Alexis, “My Anabasis,” The Night Piece: Collected Short Fiction (M&S, 2020)
- Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945)
- Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers (1966)
- Marian Engel, Bear (1976)
- Gaétan Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches (1998)
- Tamara Faith Berger, Maidenhead (2012)
- Anakana Schofield, Martin John (2015)
- Sara Peters, I Become a Delight to My Enemies (2019)
- Pasha Malla, Kill the Mall (2020)
- André Alexis, The Night Piece (2020)
- Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English (2022)
- Anthony Oliveira, Dayspring (2024)
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Short Written Weekly Responses – 20%
- Seminar Participation – 20%
- 5,000 Word Research Paper – 60%
ENG1200HF
‘The Toronto Black Lab:’ Dionne Brand, Christina Sharpe, Rinaldo Walcott, Canisia Lubrin
Chariandy, D.
Term: F-TERM (September to December 2025)
Date/Time: Monday 4:00 - 7:00 (3 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
‘The Toronto Black Lab’ is a provisional term for a cluster of writers notably including Dionne Brand, Christina Sharpe, Rinaldo Walcott, and Canisia Lubrin. Though engaging in diverse compositional practices, the Lab coheres through its distinct retooling of the Black radical tradition, its critical practice of diaspora politics, and its deeper relational sensibilities. Inherently resistant to the containments of schools, fields, or institutions, the Toronto Black Lab might best be envisioned as a mobile site of textual experiments.
In this course, we will first outline a capacious interpretive framework by reading paradigmatic texts such as Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return and Sharpe’s In the Wake; but we will likewise source vital theoretical insights from poetry, prose fiction, or creative non-fiction. We will trace Walcott’s influence on Black Canadian thought and read his The Long Emancipation for its broader reflections on Black vernacular practices and decolonial movements. We will conclude with the poetic and narrative innovations of Lubrin’s The Dyzgraphxst and Code Noir.
This course may be of interest to those invested in Black studies as well as scholars of Canadian, Caribbean, and diaspora studies. We will build into our course calendar special class visits and public events, including the annual Alchemy Lecture Series directed by Sharpe and published by Brand. We will conduct scholarly research while also pursuing creative methods and critically ‘undisciplined’ work.
Course Reading List (to be adjusted on the first day of class):
- Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging
- Brand, Dionne. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems
- Brand, Dionne. Salvage: Readings from the Wreck
- Brand, Dionne. Theory
- Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
- Sharpe, Christina. Ordinary Notes
- Walcott, Rinaldo. On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition
- Walcott, Rinaldo. The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom
- Lubrin, Canisia. Code Noir
- Lubrin, Canisia. The Dyzgraphxst
[We will also engage with other works of literature, criticism and theory, as well as films, music, and visual art].
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Participation – 20%
- Classroom Presentation (4-5 pages) – 20%
- Analytic Paper (12-15) pages – 40%
- Delineation or Practice of a ‘Creative’ Research Method (4-5 pages or other) – 20%
ENG1201HS
Malcolm X & African-Canadian Literature
Clarke, G.E.
Term: S-TERM (January to April 2026)
Date/Time: Tuesday 12:00 - 2:00 (2 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
On the centenary of Malcolm X’s birth and the 60th anniversary of his assassination, we will explore the impact of one of the 20th Century’s most formidable public intellectuals on an assortment of Black Canadian writers, including Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke, and Dany Laferriere. The miracle of Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little) is that a petty hoodlum and Grade 8 dropout, on discovering the merits of an obscure, “Muslim” sect, and charged with the responsibility of enlarging its membership, did so by becoming an autodidact intellectual and charismatic orator, devoted to exposing the evils of White Supremacy and Western Imperialism (same difference) globally. During the period of his “ministry,” 1955-1965, X espoused anti-imperialist and anti-racist ideas that flowered in the birth of Black Consciousness, Black Arts, and Black Power movements (including the birth of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense), mainly in the United States, but also globally, including in England, the Caribbean, and Canada. The very existence of Black Studies even in the Great White North, indeed, reflects the long-distance impact of Malcom X’s thought. This course will interest everyone interested in how writers/artists create philosophical poetry and/or dissident narratives out of ideological commitments.
Course Reading List:
- X, Malcolm. Autobiography of Malcolm X.
- Clarke, Austin. The Austin Clarke Reader.
- Freeman, Douglas Gary. Exile Blues.
- Brand, Dionne. Land to Light On.
- Jones & Walker. Burnley “Rocky” Jones: Revolutionary.
- Atkinson & Fiorito. The Life Crimes and Hard Times of Ricky Atkinson.
- Prince, Althea. Being Black.
- Sears, Djanet. Harlem Duet.
- Abernethy, Graeme. Iconography of Malcolm X.
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Participation - 20%
- 2 Essays - 80%
ENG1300HS
Asian Canadian Coalitions, Solidarities and Uneven Intimacies
Lai, L.
Term: S-TERM (January to April 2026)
Date/Time: Thursday 3:00 - 6:00 (3 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
Recognizing Asian Canadian Literature as an emergent field, simultaneously old and new, this course investigates its coalitional origins as well as contemporary coalitions that it makes. It addresses other connective terms as well, especially solidarity, allyship and intimacy. Possible relationships to be investigated in include Asian Canadian Literature's connection to Asian American Literature, Asian Canadian Literature's connection to Black Canadian Literature, Asian Canadian Literature's connection to Indigenous Turtle Island Literature. We might investigate as well individual collaborations between Asian Canadian writers and writers of other backgrounds. Key to our discussion will be Lisa Lowe's notion of the intimacies of four continents, and her recognition that racial categories are unevenly produced in relation to land theft, property making and labour. We will consider the term "BIPOC" as a coalitional term that both enables relationships and buries power imbalances. We might also consider the productivities and limitations of Canada's Multiculturalism policy, as well as the debates that brought it into being.
Course Reading List:
- All Our Father's Relations. Directed by Alejandro Yoshizawa. Performances by Wade Grant, Howard Grant, Larry Grant, Right Relations, 2016.
- Brand, Dionne What We All Long For. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2005.
- Byrd, Jodi A. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011.
- Chambers, Nadine. "Sometimes Clocks Turn Back for Us to Move Forward: Reflections on Black and Indigenous Geographies." Counterclockwise Sp. Issue.
- Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies. 8.1 (2019): 23-30.
- Christian, Dorothy, and Rita Wong. "Untapping Watershed Mind." Thinking With Water.
- Cecilia Chen et al., eds. Montreal: McGill Queen's U P, 2103. 232-253.
- Christian, Dorothy, and Rita Wong. Downstream: Reimagining Water. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier U P, 2017. Compton, Wayde. The Outer Harbour. Arsenal Pulp, 2015.
- Goellnicht, Donald. "A Long Labour: The Protracted Birth of Asian Canadian Literature." Essays in Canadian Writing. 72 (2000): 1-41.
- Kamboureli, Smaro. "Sedative Politics." Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada. Waterloo: WLUP, 2009. 81-130. Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke U P, 2015.
- Maracle, Lee. Sojourners and Sundogs. Vancouver: Press Gang, 1999.
- Mayr, Suzette. Venous Hum. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2004.
- Miki, Roy. "Asiancy." Broken Entries: Race, Subjectivity, Writing. Toronto: Mercury, 1998. 101- 124.
- Moosang, Faith. First Son: Portraits by C. D. Hoy. Vancouver: Presentation House and Arsenal Pulp, 1999.
- Wong, Rita. "Decolonizasian." Canadian Literature 199 (Winter): 2008. 158-180.
- Wilson, Nic, ed. Dark Chapters: Reading the Still Lives of David Garneau. Regina: U of Regina P, 2025.
- Yee, Paul. A Superior Man. Arsenal Pulp, 2015.
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Presentations (15 minutes each) - 20% X 2
- Final Assignment (12 - 15 pages) - 40%
- Participation and Participation Portfolio - 20%
Term: F-TERM (September to December 2025)
Date/Time: Friday 3:00 - 6:00 (3 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
Many American writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries were the first person in their families, over many generations, to acquire advanced literacy. This experience, as documented in a range of remarkable memoirs, novels, stories, and poems published unto the present, has been represented as vastly liberating, but also often acutely painful. It seems to entail both an exhilarating expansion of horizons and a difficult uprooting. In this course we will read a selection of such works in the effort to further our understanding of the ambivalent process of socialization into the modern American-liberal symbolic, and the place of reading therein. We will be especially interested in depictions of what Habermas calls “context shattering” – crisis moments in which the achievement of advanced literacy causes the “spellbinding authority” of long-established traditions to be demystified, destabilized, and perhaps transcended. Habermas argues that such “shatterings” are necessary stages in a forward path towards moral and political emancipation. We will ask whether these works support Habermas’s outlook. May we read the dis-embedded selves painfully achieved and powerfully described in these American bildungs-narratives as figures of human enlightenment? Might these works thus provide secondary symbolic orientation and cohesion for members of dispersed, individualistic, liberal communities no longer gripped and bound by archaic solidarities?
Course Reading List:
Primary Works May Include:
- Richard Wright, Black Boy (1937)
- James Farrell, My Days of Anger (1943)
- James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son” (1955)
- Bernard Malamud, “A Summer’s Reading” (1957)
- Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman (1957; 2015)
- Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory (1983)
- Rita Dove, Thomas and Beulah (1986)
- Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)
- Henry Louis Gates, Colored People (1994)
- Alice McDermott, After This (2006)
- Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian (2009)
- Tara Westover, Educated (2018)
- Jim Daniels, “Digger” poems (1990s – 2020s)
Secondary Works May Include:
- from Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (1957)
- from Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973)
- from Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (1984)
- from Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action (1981); Between Fact and Norm (1992)
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Attendance and Informed Participation in Discussion - 20%
- One In-Class Presentation - 20%
- One Term Paper 4-5,000 words - 60%
ENG4100HS
Gender, Militarization, and Ecology
Hogue, R.
Term: S-TERM (January to April 2026)
Date/Time: Monday 4:00 - 7:00 (3 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
Since 2001, the United States military has emitted 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases—more than 140 nations combined—making it the single greatest polluting institution in the world. Militarization—how a society’s institutions, policies, behaviors, thought, and values are devoted to military power and shaped by war—and all of its ecological entanglements, Cynthia Enloe argues, relies on ideas about femininity and masculinity, filled with what Carol Cohn has called the “gendered discourse of national security.” This course thus explores how militarization is environmental, personal, political, and gendered. With specific attention to the discursive, we will examine how writers, scholars, activists, and artists contend with the intersections of gender, militarization, and ecology. Using methods from the Environmental Humanities, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Critical Indigenous Studies, we will discuss narrative and poetic engagements with militarization in the 20th and 21st centuries, primarily focused in the Pacific, Asia, and North America. Topics will include but are not limited to: environmental justice, waste, surveillance, ecofeminism, militourism, nuclear imperialism, chemical warfare, and toxicity.
Course Reading List:
- Allegories of the Anthropocene, Elizabeth DeLoughrey
- Settler Garrison, Jodi Kim
- Hot Spotter's Report, Shiloh Krupar
- Ocean Passages, Erin Suzuki
- Tonal Intelligence, Sunny Xiang
- "Bikinis and Other S/Pacific N/Oceans,” Teresia Teaiwa
- A Violent Peace, Christine Hong
- "The Pacific Proving Grounds," Aimee Bahng
- Iep Jaltok, Kathy Jetnil Kijiner
- Civilised Girl, Jully Makini
- Night is a Sharkskin Drum, Haunani Kay Trask
- Ocean Mother, Arielle Taitano Lowe
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Participation - 20%
- Weekly Discussion Posts - 20%
- Presentation - 25%
- Final Conference Paper - 35%
ENG4101HF
Global Protest Cultures
Mehta, R.
Term: F-TERM (September to December 2025)
Date/Time: Thursday 12:00 - 2:00 (2 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
This course studies cultural forms that participate in movements and critiques of liberation (national as well as minoritized). It focuses on political and aesthetic gestures of commitment to future revolutionary possibilities in anticolonial, antiracist, and feminist thought and praxis, especially on the reinvention of literary and media codes and canons that unfold in such struggles. We will analyze subversive fiction, political essays/manifestos, prison memoirs, resistance poetry, documentary and narrative cinema, and photographic and televisual texts to address urgent questions about political existence in the long twentieth century of decolonization.
Course Reading List:
Readings from Angela Davis, Anne Cheng, BR Ambedkar, Saba Mahmood, CLR James, Frantz Fanon, Sara Ahmed, Saidiya Hartman, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrie Moraga, Anand Patwardhan, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, and others.
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Participation - 20%
- Presentation - 20%
- Midterm Paper - 20%
- Final Paper - 40%
ENG4102HS
Postcolonial Ecocriticism
Azubuko-Udah, C.
Term: S-TERM (January to April 2026)
Date/Time: Tuesday 2:00 - 4:00 (2 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
This seminar examines the intersections of postcolonialism and ecocriticism as well as the tensions between these conceptual nodes, with readings drawn from across the global South. Topics of discussion include colonialism, ecological degradation, resource extraction, globalization, decolonial epistemologies, futurity, the challenges of narrativization, and structural and slow violence. The course is concerned with varieties of environmentalism, biocultural relations, and the narrative strategies affording the illumination of these ideas. The course prepares students to respond to key issues in postcolonial ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, analyze the work of the major thinkers in the fields, and examine literary texts and other cultural productions from a postcolonial perspective.
Course Reading List:
Books:
- Jamaica Kincaid - A Small Place.
- Mayra Montero - In the Palm of Darkness.
- Imbolo Mbue - How Beautiful We Were.
- Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide.
- Zakes Mda - Heart of Redness
Films:
- Sandy Cioffi - Sweet Crude
- Jon Shenk - Island President
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Conference Paper (6-8 pages) - 35%
- Second Paper (6-8 pages) - 35%
- Weekly Summary, Synthesis, and Questions - 20%
- In-Class Participation - 10%
- The participation portfolio should contain questions emailed to me and any comments prepared for class. You may include in addition any other material that offers evidence of good participation, though this is not required.
ENG5100HF
Medieval Drama: Global Plays in Translation
Sergi, M.
Term: F-TERM (September to December 2025)
Date/Time: Monday 11:00 - 1:00 (2 Hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
Growing out of an ongoing JHI Working Group on Medieval World Drama (and drawing from that working group's sizable syllabus), this course will offer students the opportunity to read a broad range of examples, all translated into modern English, of global play texts from before 1510 (with some slightly later exceptions). Most of the dramatic traditions from which our readings are drawn had no significant contact with each other before 1510: hardly enough to exert influence on each other's form and content. The considerable similarities that will emerge among these readings, then, will challenge us to consider what (if anything) might be inherent to the very act of creating a text for live performance -- or to critique the homogenizing effects of the translation process, and of translating early global texts into modern English in particular. By design, the globetrotting sweep of this course necessitates some dilettantism: we will certainly read essays that contextualize the plays, but since no one (not even the instructor) could possibly be a true specialist in more than a couple of the traditions we’ll visit, we will centre our discussions on discovery, newness, open inquiry, and cold reading, while considering the ramifications of our literary tourism. Practical rationales and techniques of translation will be a concern of this course – a few of the translators themselves will likely make guest appearances by Zoom (as they have often done in the JHI group).
No knowledge of languages other than English is required for this course, but students will be invited to use any linguistic proficiencies they happen to have, to generate critiques of course translations or, if they wish, to make their own attempts at translation.
Course Reading List:
Our reading list is subject to change, but here are some likely offerings:
- The Life of Saint Kea (trans. from Cornish)
- Muhammad ibn Daniyal's The Infatuated and the Ravishing (trans. from Arabic)
- La Seinte Resurreccion and Jeu D'Adam (trans. from Anglo-French)
- Thomas Chaundler's Defense Of Human Nature In Every State (trans. from Anglo-Latin)
- Rabinal Achi (Man of Rabinal), translated from the K’iche’
- Top Graduate Zhang Xie (trans. from medieval southern Chinese)
- selections from Zeami's Noh plays (trans. from Japanese)
- selections from Juan del Encina's Eclogues (trans. from Spanish)
- A Play Concerning Saint Knud, Duke (trans. from Danish)
- selections from farces from the Recueil du British Museum (trans. from French).
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Engagement and Participation in class discussions - 20%
- Two 10- or 15-Minute Presentations during class discussions - 15% each (totaling 30%)
- Annotated Bibliography - 10%
- Conference-Length Research-Critique Paper or Original Translation/Edition (20 minutes of material, with an option to extend into an article-length study) - 40%
ENG5101HF
The Canterbury Tales
Gaston, K.
Term: F-TERM (September to December 2025)
Date/Time: Thursday 2:00 - 4:00 (2 Hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
This course explores Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the context of several different critical approaches, such as historicism, formalism, intertextuality, gender studies, and textual criticism. We read the Canterbury Tales in their entirety, examining some of the interpretive issues with which recent Chaucer criticism has been most concerned, and considering relevant ancient and medieval sources and analogues.
Course Reading List:
- The Canterbury Tales (in Middle English)
- Selected secondary readings
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- One Short Essay - 20%
- One Longer Essay (15-18 pages) - 40%
- Annotated Bibliography - 10%
- Oral Presentation - 10%
- Class Participation - 20%
ENG5200HF
The Queer Renaissance: Queer Studies, Early Modern Texts
Chakravarty, U.
Term: F-TERM (September to December 2025)
Date/Time: Tuesday 3:00 - 6:00 (3 Hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
In this course, we shall read a number of early modern texts alongside recent work on sexuality, queer, and trans theory to ask: What are the affordances and implications of the ‘queer’ for early modern literature? How are our understandings of sexuality and queerness historically constructed and contested? And how do we think with trans theory towards reconfigurations of gender, race, and queerness? We shall read works by Shakespeare, Lyly, Marlowe, Donne and other early modern poets and playwrights in conversation with work in queer theory by Bersani, Bey, Butler, Edelman, Foucault, Halberstam, Halperin, Holland, Muñoz, Puar, and Snorton, and recent scholarship at the intersection of early modern and queer and trans studies. We shall also explore queer and trans approaches to race, transnationalism and empire; gender, embodiment, and feminism; religion and theology; temporality, historicity and historiography; form and philology; politics, class and capitalism; and family and kinship to ask how early modern literary texts both respond to and re-imagine these critical intersections. Finally, we shall ask: how might the field of early modern studies not only respond to but also inform work in queer studies?
Course Reading List:
Primary texts may include:
- Lyly, Galatea
- Marlowe, Edward II
- Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
- Dekker and Middleton, The Roaring Girl
- selected poems by Donne
- selections from Milton, Paradise Lost
Theoretical and critical readings may include work by (subject to change):
- Leo Bersani
- Marquis Bey
- Judith Butler
- Lee Edelman
- Michel Foucault
- Colby Gordon
- Jack Halberstam
- Sharon Patricia Holland
- Jeffrey Masten
- José Esteban Muñoz
- Ian Smith
- C. Riley Snorton
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Active and Informed Participation - 15%
- Seminar Facilitation - 10%
- Short Weekly Responses - 15%
- Paper Prospectus and Annotated Bibliography for final paper - 10%
- In-Class Conference Paper - 10%
- Final Research Paper - 40%
ENG5201HF
Early Modern Manuscripts
Teramura, M.
Term: F-TERM (September to December 2025)
Date/Time: Wednesday 4:00 - 7:00 (3 Hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
While the digitization of early English printed books has revolutionized literary scholarship, a massive field of textual production, one that permeated every facet of early modern life, remains comparatively understudied: manuscripts. Poetry, drama, prose fiction, letters, diaries, recipe books—the rich and varied manuscript archive offers ever-expanding horizons for research as new digitization projects are making manuscripts around the world more accessible than ever before. This seminar will introduce participants to a wide range of manuscript genres while providing sustained practice in paleography. We will begin by examining the kinds of manuscripts most closely relevant to literary study (authorial holographs, verse miscellanies, dramatic scripts) and move on to other forms of manuscript production (letters, government documents, commonplace books, financial records). The goals of this seminar are: to introduce participants to the scope of early modern manuscript culture; to develop participants' skills in transcribing early modern hands; to provide orientation to the resources that will allow participants to locate and access manuscripts; and to give participants a sense of the new research possibilities on manuscript sources.
Course Reading List:
Primary readings will likely include manuscripts of works by authors such as John Donne, Queen Elizabeth I, John Milton, and Hester Pulter; while many of these texts will be short, the most substantial will likely be the collaboratively authored play Sir Thomas More (Arden edition) and Love's Victory by Lady Mary Wroth. Primary readings will be paired with secondary texts on manuscript culture from a range of historical, literary critical, and paleographical perspectives.
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Participation - 20%
- Mini-Assignments - 20%
- In-Class Presentation - 10%
- Final Project - 50%
ENG5202HS
The Invention of Colonialism: Richard Hakluyt and Medieval Travel Writing in Early Modern England
Sobecki, S.
Term: S-TERM (January to April 2026)
Date/Time: Tuesday 10:00 - 12:00 (2 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
Early modern writers readily seized on medieval texts to advance political positions. Richard Hakluyt, the great Elizabethan collector of travel writing, is often credited with first formulating England’s budding colonial ideology. In doing so, Hakluyt relied largely on medieval texts, such as the 14th-century Mandeville's Travels or the 13th-century missions to Mongolia. This course will explore how these premodern texts already conveyed the essence of the expansionist mercantilism and colonialist imperialism that would characterize the Elizabethan reach for the New World. Our course will involve working with manuscripts and early printed books at UofT's Fisher Rare Book Library. The course will advance three positions: first, that Hakluyt, John Dee, Sir Walter Raleigh, and their contemporaries were much better and closer readers of medieval travel texts than we give credit them for; second: that the ideology behind English colonialism was invented in the late medieval period, not in Elizabethan England, and third: that another facet of periodization, with its emphasis on rupture rather than continuity, comes under scrutiny.
Course Reading List:
Course will involve working with manuscripts and early printed books at UofT's Fisher Rare Book Library
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Participation - 20%
- Book Review - 10%
- Presentation - 10%
- Short Essay - 20%
- Final Essay - 40%
ENG5203HS
Early Modern Theater Theories
Williams, K.
Term: S-TERM (January to April 2026)
Date/Time: Thursday 1:00 - 3:00 (2 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
This course asks: how was the early modern English theater theorized by detractors, defenders, playwrights, actors, and audiences? What does early modern drama teach us about how the theater works? And, how can examples from the early modern theater inform or complicate key paradigms of performance theory in the present? This course will serve as an introduction to the broad sweep of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English drama and a sustained investigation into how the early modern theater develops and refines its formal protocols, concepts that continue to animate theater today. Our inquiry in this course will take shape around three sets of texts: early modern polemical writing about the theater that aims to take stock of its efficacy and perilous possibility (such as anti-theatrical writing by Philip Stubbes, Stephen Gosson, William Prynne, and others); early modern plays that seem especially interested in interrogating how the theater works (including The Spanish Tragedy, Mucedorus, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The Alchemist, The Silver Age, A Game At Chess, and The Roman Actor); and contemporary theoretical work on performance that accounts for the theater’s formal operations (likely including work by Tavia Nyong’o, Peggy Phelan, Joseph Roach, Rebecca Schneider, Bert States, Diana Taylor, and others).
Course Reading List:
- Thomas Preston, Cambises, ed. James Siemon (Routledge)
- Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Andrew Gurr (New Mermaids)
- William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine (Folger)
- Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. Hattaway (New Mermaids)
- Thomas Heywood, The Brazen Age, ed. Ioppolo (Oxford)
- Philip Massinger, The Roman Actor, ed. White (Revels)
- Selected anti-theatrical writing; selected performance theory
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Weekly Post and Engaged Participation in seminar discussions - 20% participation + 10% reflection post / 30% total
- Short Exercise - 20%
- Final Project (c. 6,000 words) - 50%
ENG5300HF
Milton and Bunyan
Rogers, J.
Term: F-TERM (September to December 2025)
Date/Time: Monday 2:00 - 4:00 (2 Hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
This course has two distinct, but closely related, aims. It is committed to an in-depth study of the two most important long works of the seventeenth-century: John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678 Part 1, 1684 Part 2), with attention to the seventeenth-century literary, political, and theological energies that inspired them. It explores as well the phenomenon of the cultural engagement of Milton’s epic and Bunyan’s allegorical romance that helped shape some surprising corners of the literary, religious, and political landscapes of 18th- and 19th-century England and America.
With respect to the first aim, we will assess the function of the experiments in poetic form practiced by Milton and Bunyan, and their attempts to deploy specifically literary and rhetorical means to force a rethinking of his age’s burning controversies, especially those involving sovereignty, religious conformity and toleration, disability, and the relation of the sexes. With respect to the course’s focus on the reception of Paradise Lost, we will examine the poem’s impact on three distinct cultural moments: the late 18th-century American turn to Milton’s Satan, as exemplified in Thomas Jefferson’s Commonplace Book and the Interesting Narrative by Olaudah Equiano; and the late 18th- and early 19th- century “Miltonism” of the English poet and printmaker William Blake, in his epic Milton and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In delving into the long cultural reach of Bunyan’s best-selling Pilgrim’s Progress, we will examine the pop cultura ephemera spawned by Bunyan, such as 18th and 19th-century board games and card games based on Christian’s trip to the Celestial City; and we will study as well the 19th-century American engagements with Bunyan’s narrative, namely Hawthorne’s Celestial Railroad, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and Alcott’s Little Women.
Course Reading List:
The primary readings include Milton’s Paradise Lost and Buyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress Part One, and Pilgrim’s Progress Part Two; Jefferson’s Commonplace Book and Equiano’s Interesting Narrative; William Blake’s Milton and and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Hawthorne’s “Celestial Railroad,” Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and Alcott’s Little Women.
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Final Essay (20 pages) - 50%
- Midterm Essay (7 pages) - 20%
- Class Participation - 20%
- One Oral Presentation - 10%
ENG5301HS
Tom Jones: The First Comic Blockbuster
Dickie, S.
Term: S-TERM (January to April 2026)
Date/Time: Monday 2:00 - 4:00 (2 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
A rare opportunity to read closely, and at a manageable pace, one of the greatest comic novels in the English language. First published in 1749, Fielding’s TOM JONES was an immediate bestseller and the subject of ferocious controversy. While enemies attacked the book for its bawdy humour and low morals, others realized that Fielding had effectively invented “a new species of writing.” Over time, the book’s blending of picaresque and romance structures produced several generations of European Bildungsromane. Fielding’s narrative innovations were taken up by Austen, Dickens, and Eliot, and have made TOM JONES a valuable case study for literary theorists (including Bakhtin, Iser, and Genette).
By concentrating on a single text, we will be able to pursue three larger aims. First, we will genuinely understand TOM JONES within its historical context, including the social and political structures of eighteenth-century Britain; reading practices and the book market; religion, the law, gender, and sexuality. Second, we will have time to analyze, precisely and unrelentingly, Fielding’s techniques as a writer. As the course goes on, we will build up a sizeable list of these techniques and find terminologies for them. Third, since Fielding is one of the most complex and elusive prose stylists in the English tradition, we will bring to this novel the sort of rigorous close reading that is normally reserved for poetry.
Course Reading List:
- Henry Fielding, TOM JONES (ed. Keymer, Penguin)
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Five Short Discussion Starters (c. 300 words) - 15%
- Essay Proposal and Annotated Bibliography (2-3 pp.) - 25%
- Final Essay (3000-3500 words) - 45%
- Active and Informed Participation - 15%
ENG5302HS
Eighteenth-Century Children's Literature: Genre, Gender, and the Book Trade
Percy, C.
Term: S-TERM (January to April 2026)
Date/Time: Wednesday 12:00 - 2:00 (2 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
Through the ‘long’ eighteenth century, children’s books increased in number and in variety. This course will explore these publications within their intellectual and social contexts. How did literature for children adopt or adapt trends in contemporary adult literature (e.g. satire, sensibility)? What can representations of supernatural, animal, and human characters reveal about child readers, concepts of childhood, parenthood and development, and social relations and divisions in Britain and its empire? What can we learn from examining the books themselves?
The course is organized by genre to provide a structured understanding of the diverse literary forms that emerged during this time. This approach allows us to explore how different authors modified these genres as well as their connections to adult literature and to broader cultural and intellectual trends. The genres covered will include, but not be limited to, ABCs and readers, fables and animal stories, fairy tales, school stories, natural history and science, travel and adventure, family stories, and poetry.
With a few contrasting texts for each week’s genre, we will also pay particular attention to how gender is represented and constructed, how each reflect and challenge contemporary notions of gender roles and identities, and how they contribute to the socialization of young readers. A final focus of the course is the book trade. Drawing on the nearby resources of the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, students will have an opportunity to explore the material aspect of the production of books, games, and other educational products. Publishers of particular interest might include William Godwin and his Juvenile Library.
A research paper on a topic of your own choosing is at the heart of the course. Brief low-stakes reflections on the week’s readings and a mid-course proposal will help you develop a topic, in consultation with me and your classmates. A presentation of your topic and friendly feedback from classmates will assist you in producing the final paper.
Course Reading List:
Primary sources for weekly readings will include 2-3 examples per week from ABCs and readers, fables and animal stories, fairy tales, school stories, natural history and science, travel and adventure, family stories, and poetry. For most of the weeks we will include a text by Ellenor Fenn, to retain some sort of focus. Readings will be available electronically.
For the weekly readings, the Grenby *Children's Literature* is generically organized and along with Hahn entries and CCCL chapters will provide basic genre-grounded context. Although I will also provide one scholarly article per week, each student will be asked as part of their weekly N/CR response to find a scholarly article that suits their particular perspective on the genre.
Reference works will include:
- Grenby, M. O. (Matthew Orville). The Child Reader, 1700-1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
- Grenby, M. O. (Matthew Orville). Children’s Literature. Second edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
- Grenby, M. O. (Matthew Orville), and Andrea Immel, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
- Hahn, Daniel. The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- N/CR Weekly Discussion Posts on the Weekly Readings - 15%
- A Proposal with Bibliography - 15%
- A Presentation - 20%
- A Final Research Paper - 40%
- Participation - 10%
ENG5401HS
Romantic Anger, Revisited
Weisman, K.
Term: S-TERM (January to April 2026)
Date/Time: Wednesday 4:00 - 6:00 (2 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
Romantic-era England bears witness to a remarkable concatenation of passionate response to heated debates concerning war, revolution, slavery and abolition, imperialism and colonialism, the rights of women, the rights of human beings, the role of religion, and the meaning of nationhood. Many of the salient concerns of Romanticism are related to the period’s changing understanding of “the passions,” and to the fiery rhetoric of new discourses (revolutionary, nationalist, social). This course will survey the field afresh and will include historical and philosophical contextualization from Aristotle to Shelley.
Course Reading List:
Primary Source Reading from the following:
Primary source reading will include fiction and poetry, including such texts as the following: Mary Robinson, selected poetry; Charlotte Smith, The Emigrants, and selected poetry; Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy, Prometheus Unbound, and selected poetry; Lord Byron, selected poetry; Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince; Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman; Mary Hays, The Victim of Prejudice.
Selected other reading from the following: Aristotle (Ethics, Rhetoric); Seneca (On Anger): Hume (Treatise of Human Nature); Locke (Essay Concerning Human Understanding); Adam Smith (Theory of Moral Sentiments); Hobbes (Leviathan); Mary Wollstonecraft (Vindication of the Rights of Woman); Burke (Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful)
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Article Review (orally delivered) - 15%
- Seminar Presentation - 25%
- Class Participation - 10%
- Final Research Paper - 50%
ENG5402HF
Romanticism and Technology
White, D.
Term: F-TERM (September to December 2025)
Date/Time: Wednesday 2:00 - 4:00 (2 Hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
This course explores the manifold, uneasy relationships between Romanticism and technology, a word in the process of taking on its current meanings during the period. From Anna Barbauld's "The Canal and the Brook. A Reverie," Joanna Baillie's "Address to a Steam Vessel," and William Wordsworth's "Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways" to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, P.B. Shelley's "Letter to Maria Gisborne," and Thomas De Quincey's "The English Mail-Coach," Romantic writing presents a wide range of ambiguous, anxious, and/or surprisingly enthusiastic responses to the "motions and means" (Wordsworth) of the modern world. Exploring this range, we will revisit fundamental questions raised by Romantic literature, including relationships between humanity and nature, subjects and objects, spirit and matter, organicism and mechanism, along with new understandings of value, labour, mobility, and alienation under the conditions of early-nineteenth-century global capitalism. We will end by turning to early British India, where a spate of speculative fictions appeared tracing utopian and dystopian futures driven by the twin powers of trade and steam.
Course Reading List:
Poetry and prose by Blake, Barbauld, Baillie, Wordsworth, M. Shelley, P.B. Shelley, Peacock, Carlyle, De Quincey, Goodeve, and Parker along with critical and theoretical sources
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Research Paper (18-20 pp) - 50%
- Abstract and Bibliography - 10%
- Mini-Conference Presentation (18-20 minutes followed by q & a) - 20%
- Class Participation - 20%
ENG5403HS
Ethics and Aesthetics: The Late Victorians
Li, H.
Term: S-TERM (January to April 2026)
Date/Time: Wednesday 6:00 - 8:00 (2 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
This course examines the late Victorians’ intellectual efforts to move beyond mid-Victorian culture. In particular, we will focus on their conception of the relations between ethics and aesthetics, as a paradigm shift away from mid-Victorian ideas of ethics, which were often rational and prescriptive. By analyzing the literary representations of ethos in George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, William Morris, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, we will reconstruct a contestatory and subjectivity-based ethics in these writers that was ironic, sensory and counter-factual, a new “higher ethics” (Walter Pater). Issues to be discussed include dialectics of futuristic envisioning, fantasy and utopia, naturalist affect, and feelings as the intellect.
Course Reading List:
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876); Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895); William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890); Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873); and Oscar Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). We’ll also read theoretical works by Adorno, Anderson, Badiou, Cavell, Kristeva, Levinas, and Scarry.
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- One Seminar Presentation - 25%
- One Major Essay - 55%
- Informed Class Participation (including Quercus responses and mini-conference participation) - 20%
ENG5500HF
Virginia Woolf's Craft
Battershill, C.
Term: F-TERM (September to December 2025)
Date/Time: Friday 10:00 - 1:00 (3 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
In this course, we will read across the works of Virginia Woolf, from her most well-known novels to selections from her short fiction, essays, diaries, and correspondence. Throughout the course we will consider Woolf's approach to "craft" both in the writerly sense of crafting language and in the material sense of making books and participating in collaborative work as a publisher at the Hogarth Press and in her relationships to the interdisciplinary artistic world of early 20th-century London. Through visits to the Virginia Woolf collection at the E. J. Pratt Library and the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, we will become familiar with the first editions and material artifacts of Woolf's world and with her various archives. We will conclude the course by considering the afterlives and adaptations of Woolf's works across a variety of genres and forms -- from zines to ballet. In the spirit of those adaptations and responses across media, both academic and creative final assignments will be welcome for this course, and students will be invited to consider Woolf's critical reflections on her creative practice as invitations to develop reflective practices of their own.
Course Reading List:
Novels by Virginia Woolf:
- Night and Day (1919)
- Jacob's Room (1922)
- Mrs Dalloway (1925)
- To the Lighthouse (1927)
- Orlando: A Biography (1928)
- The Waves (1931)
- Selections from short fiction, essays, and diaries and a variety of Woolf-related adaptations
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Adaptation Review - 20%
- Diary or Reading Notebook Portfolio - 30%
- Participation and Collaboration - 20%
- Final Assignment (Creative Piece or Essay) - 30%
ENG6552HF
Law and Literature
Stern, S
Term: F-TERM (September to December 2025)
Date/Time: Wednesday 10:30 - 12:30 (2 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
O.W. Holmes: “The life of the law has not been logic but experience.”
O.Wilde: “Experience is the name we give to our past mistakes.”
Each week we will read several articles, along with several short stories and novels during the term. We will begin with a consideration of some of the questions and criticisms that scholars have recently raised as they have sought to justify or reorient the field. We will then look at some of the specific problems connecting law and literature at various points since the Renaissance. After a more intensive look at current theoretical debates, we will take up various problems at the intersection of law and literature: legal fictions, forms of legal writing and explanation, and the regulation of literature through copyright law. Next, we will focus on two legal problems that have also occupied literary thinkers: the problem of criminal responsibility and literature’s ability to document human thought and motives, and the question of privacy in criminal law, tort law, and fiction. We will end by considering possible future directions for law and literature. The course requirements will include a final paper and two or three response papers for presentation in class.
Course Reading List:
Each unit includes some required readings and a number of suggested sources for students who are interested in doing further research in a particular area.
Some of the questions we will discuss include:
Some of the questions we will discuss include:
- How does literature use or respond to legal structures, themes, and analytical techniques, and vice versa?
- How does literature portray legal institutions and processes?
- What can literature bring to the performance of legal tasks, including legal narrative?
- To what extent can literary critical accounts of narrative structure and coherence explain the role of narrative in law, and where do these accounts fall short?
- What is achieved and what is missed by positing literature as law’s “other” (e.g., as the imaginative and ethical alternative to legal rules and constraints)?
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Final Paper - 80%
- A 2-3 Page Response Paper for Presentation in Class -10%
- Class Participation - 10%
ENG6950Y
Creative Writing Workshop
Greene, R. (F-Term) & Naga, N. (S-Term)
Term: Y-TERM (September 2025 to April 2026)
F-Term Date/Time: Tuesday 1:00 - 3:00 (2 hours)
S-Term Date/Time: Friday 3:00 - 5:00 (2 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
F-Term Course Description (Prof. Greene):
This course in creative writing allows for the development of works in multiple genres. Most successful writers have relied on the insight of their peers to bring their work to its final form. So too in this course, students will present their own works and contribute to the development and revision of pieces written by others. The essence of this course will be thoughtful conversation about the act of literary creation.
Course Reading List:
There is no reading list.
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
The final grade will be equally weighted between the two semesters. This semester’s component will be based on three elements:
Presentations of Creative Work - 20%
Class Participation - 20%
Portfolio of Completed Work - 60%
Class Participation - 20%
Portfolio of Completed Work - 60%
ENG6960Y
Advanced Creative Writing Workshop
McGill, R.
Term: Y-TERM (September 2025 to April 2026)
Date/Time: Monday 3:00 - 5:00 (2 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
This course provides a framework for students in the MA program in the Field of Creative Writing to complete their creative projects while considering other aspects of a writing life. Course activities will include the generation of project material and the editing of manuscripts, as well as attention to matters such as public readings, the production of literary magazines, grant applications, and best practices with respect to editorial feedback and the assessment of creative work. Please note that this course constitutes 0.5 FCE spread across the Fall and Winter terms, and we will meet twelve times in total.
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
This is a CR/NCR course. To receive credit, students will need to meet the course requirements for their creative and editorial submissions, and they will need to attend classes regularly and to participate meaningfully in course activities.
ENG6999YF
Critical Topographies: Theory and Practice of Contemporary Literary Studies in English
Hammond, A & Boyagoda, R.
*This course is mandatory for all MA, JD/MA, and first-year PhD U (direct-entry) students.*
Term: F-TERM (September to December 2025)
Date/Time: Tuesday 12:00 - 3:00 (3 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
The aim of Critical Topographies: Theory and Practice of Contemporary Literary Studies in English is to provide MA students about to embark on professional studies in the discipline of "English" with a comprehensive overview or set of maps with which to understand the discipline and locate themselves in the current state of the field. Contemporary literary studies in English can sometimes appear bewildering in terms of both the issues analyzed and methods applied - so much so that there is now no one unifying paradigm, objective, or methodology. The course aims to address this phenomenon; it aims not only to chart current critical topographies but also to suggest how they came into being and what opportunities they and new modes of critical practice offer for significant future research.
Course Reading List:
There is no advance reading list; students will receive it with the syllabus in September.
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Participation - 15%
- Position Paper - 15%
- Annotated Bibliography - 10%
- Essay Proposal - 15%
- Essay - 45%
ENG7100HF
Kind of Like: Difference, Similarity, Comparison
Thomas, A.
Term: F-TERM (September to December 2025)
Date/Time: Wednesday 12:00 - 2:00 (2 Hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
How do literary and cultural studies approach the question of similarity without collapsing into sameness? And how do we consider and write through the consequences of comparison? This course takes as its premise the unevenness inherent in any act of comparison across geography, history, group. Rather than treating the incommensurate but proximate as an impasse, this course investigates what methodologies can ethically bring intertwined and/or disparate histories into view and explores how to productively read literatures that arise from contexts of oppression.
Course Reading List:
Reading will focus in Black and Postcolonial Studies, but students are encouraged to do comparative work in their research paper within or beyond these fields.
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Participation - 20%
- Seminar Presentation/Class facilitation/ Syllabus contribution - 20%
- Final Paper (15 pages) - 50%
- Course reflection - 10%
- The presenting student will select an additional reading or selection of a reading (ten pages or under) to add to the syllabus
ENG7101HF
Literature and Medicine: Corpus, Theory, Praxis
Charise, A.
Term: F-TERM (September to December 2025)
Date/Time: Monday 12:00 - 2:00 (2 Hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
This seminar is a critical introduction to the interdisciplinary field of literature and medicine: its key texts and issues, current conceptual frameworks, and contemporary scenes of practice. We will consider the basics of illness narratives (including thematics like pain, ethics, and the medical encounter), alongside distinctive formal conventions and genres (like memoir and creative nonfiction, physician writing, lyric, speculative fiction). We will also consider the implications of the past two decades' enthusiastic uptake of literary concepts by the health professions — "narrative" and "close reading" especially—for the purposes of enhancing clinical competencies like compassion, empathy, and the "humanizing" of medicine. How might we, as scholars of literary studies, better theorize the emergence of literary sensibilities in the twenty-first century clinic? Why would the deployment of literary concepts, tools, and methods constitute such a fraught moment in the historical debate regarding the value of the humanities?
This seminar's deliberate interweaving of literary writings with theoretical texts is intended to complement our ongoing consideration of praxis as it regards literature and medicine. To this end, students will also be provided the opportunity to develop transferable skills in "narrative medicine," a workshop-based, practical methodology that expands the purview—or pushes the limits—of contemporary literary studies. Although our readings will focus on contemporary Anglophone/North American writing, this course is also intended to serve as a more general introduction to literary "medical" or "health" humanities. Seminar participants are encouraged to make use of readings to further their own projects and field interests.
Course Reading List:
- Jay Baruch, Fourteen Stories: Doctors, Patients, and Other Strangers (Kent State)
- Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 2nd Ed. (Chicago)
- Rita Charon, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (Oxford)
- Porochista Khakpour, Sick: A Memoir (Harper)
- Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Duke)
- Mimi Khúc, dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss (Duke)
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- a) Fixed Evaluation 50% (Common to all students: Participation (15%), seminar presentation (15%), short essay (20%))
- b) Variable Evaluation 50% (Each student's choice of final project, e.g., Teaching portfolio OR narrative medicine pilot program OR research essay, etc)
ENG7102HS
Critical Theory and Science & Technology Studies
Slater, A.
Term: S-TERM (January to April 2025)
Date/Time: Wednesday 12:00 - 2:00 (2 Hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
Scholars in the humanities are increasingly drawn into debates concerning the social impact of science and technology. These interdisciplinary conversations often balance the rigors of scientific method alongside the interpretive power of the humanities. How has critical theory combined with science and technology studies (STS) to interpret and challenge scientific discourse across the years? This course will introduce important intersections between critical theory and STS. With an eye to the latest developments in these overlapping fields, we will investigate the nature of these interdisciplinary formations. This course will provide a grounding in the methods and arguments that shape how literary and humanistic inquiry intervene in the world of science and technology.
Course Reading List:
Readings may include:
- Stacey Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self
- Ruha Benjamin, excerpts from Race After Technology
- Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, excerpts from Objectivity
- Kim TallBear, “An Indigenous, Feminist Approach to DNA Politics”
- Paul Edwards, excerpts from A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming
- Alexander Galloway, excerpts from Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization
- Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”
- Evelyn Fox Keller, excerpts from Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology
- Bruno Latour, excerpts from Science in Action
- Luciana Parisi, excerpts from Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space
- N. Katherine Hayles, excerpts from How We Became Posthuman
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Student Presentation with Discussion Questions - 10%
- Short Paper based on Student Presentation (3-4 pages, due one week after presentation) - 15%
- Active Engagement during session - 10%
- Discussion Posts (posted within one week of class session) - 10%
- Class Conference Presentation (Final two sessions) - 5%
- Final Paper (10-12 double-spaced pages, due December 16 noon EST on Quercus) - 50%
ENG7103HS
Darwin as/and Literature
Schmitt, C.
Term: S-TERM (January to April 2026)
Date/Time: Monday 12:00 - 2:00 (2 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution revolutionized biology and related disciplines such as paleontology and ecology, providing them with what continues to serve as their fundamental assumption: that life changes over time by means of natural and sexual selection. Surprisingly, that theory also transformed non-scientific fields, including literary production. We will begin with texts by Darwin himself, bringing our literary-critical abilities to bear on his prose. We'll then turn to nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century novels and short stories deeply influenced by his work. Along the way we'll pay particular attention to matters of temporality, form, character, sexuality, and race. Among other things, the course provides an immersive introduction to the field of studies of science and literature.
Course Reading List:
Likely texts include Darwin's *The Voyage of the Beagle*, *On the Origin of Species*, and *The Descent of Man*, H. G. Wells's *The Time Machine*, Jack London's *The Sea-Wolf*, short stories by D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield, and possibly Margaret Atwood’s *Oryx and Crake* or Richard Powers’s *The Overstory*.
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Informed Participation - 20%
- Two Short Interpretations - 15% each
- Final Seminar Paper - 50%
ENG7104HS
Land, Myth and Translation in a Time of Crisis
Most, A.
Term: S-TERM (January to April 2026)
Date/Time: Wednesday 2:00 - 4:00 (2 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer re-tells the Turtle Island and Garden of Eden creation stories and imagines the fateful conversation that ensued when the two met. In this course, students will engage with Genesis 1-3 through the lens of the conversation Kimmerer proposes, asking how a reparative reading of this foundational cultural narrative might offer a strategy for meeting environmental crisis. By comparing different English versions of the Bible, students will explore how translation progressively stripped the language of Genesis 1-3 of its animacy and the story of its deep connection to land, enabling the myth to become a justification for colonization and environmental degradation. Then, utilizing apocryphal stories, Near Eastern mythology, ancient and medieval commentary from the Jewish and Christian traditions as well as ecocritical and translation theory, we will listen for echoes of an animate land-based cosmology present within the Biblical text. In addition to conventional seminar sessions, the course will include experiential workshops on different storytelling modes, in which students will enact “re-story-ation,” drawing the re-animated biblical myth into conversation with the land itself.
Course Reading List:
- Martin Shaw, Scatterlings and Smoke Hole (selections)
- Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse (selections)
- Genesis 1-3 (in multiple translations: KJV, JPS, and others)
- Ancient Near Eastern Myths; Gilgamesh, Inanna, Tiamat (translations TBD)
- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (selected essays)
- Thomas King, The Truth About Stories
- Leanne Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back (selected essays)
- Mary Jane Rubenstein, Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (selected chapters)
- Stephen Greenblatt, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (Chapters 1-3)
- Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep (Selections)
- David Abram, selections from The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Weekly Discussion Contributions - 20%
- Class Participation - 20%
- Final Project Written Component - 40%
- Final Project Presentation Component - 20%
ENG9101HF
Psychogeography and Urban Exploration
Radovic, S.
Term: F-TERM (September to December 2025)
Date/Time: Friday 1:00 - 3:00 (2 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
This seminar will engage how the spaces we inhabit and navigate shape our identities, perceptions, values, and feelings. Through the lens of “psychogeography”—defined as the exploration of the effects of the built environment on the emotions and actions of individuals—we will read a variety of fiction and non-fiction texts, using them as a point of departure and inspiration to construct our own psychogeographic readings of the city around us.
The seminar will include group and individual walks through the city – or what traditional psychogeographers called “the drift” (la dérive), to come up with written responses (creative and/or academic) as well as visual or audio capture (photographs, drawings, short videos, audio essays, etc.) that address our unique experiences of urban space and our responses to it.
Each seminar session will involve two parts: 1) a group discussion of a short reading assignment and 2) a mindful “drift” through the city inspired by that reading.
Course Reading List:
“Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography” (Guy Debord), “Formulary for a New Urbanism” (Ivan Chtcheglov), “Of Other Spaces” (Michel Foucault), The Production of Space (Henri Lefebvre), “Terrain Vague” (Ignacio de Sola-Morales), “The Uncanny” (Sigmund Freud), The Politics of Public Space (Setha Low and Neil Smith, eds.), Psychogeography (Merlin Coverly), The Architectural Uncanny (Anthony Vidler), Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers (Stephen Graham), Non-Places (Marc Augé), Explore Everything (Bradley L. Garrett), The City and the City (China Miéville), The New York Trilogy (Paul Auster), The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson), High-rise (J.G. Ballard), The Shining (Stephen King), Kindred (Octavia Butler)
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Participation - 20%
- Term Work Prospectus - 25%
- Note-taker - 5%
- Final Term Work: fiction or non-fiction writing responses; photo essays; video recordings; audio essays - 50%
- These creative responses will aim to capture the experience of the city walk based on the assigned seminar topics. A possible final exhibition to showcase this work.
ENG9102HS
Black Messiah
Durham, I.A.
Term: S-TERM (January to April 2026)
Date/Time: Thursday 4:00 - 7:00 (3 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
“Black Messiah is a hell of a name for an album. It can be easily misunderstood. Many will think it’s about religion. Some will jump to the conclusion that I’m calling myself a Black Messiah. For me, the title is about all of us. It’s about the world. It’s about an idea we can aspire to. We should all aspire to be a Black Messiah.
It’s about people rising up in Ferguson and in Egypt and in Occupy Wall Street and in every place where a community has had enough and decides to make change happen. It’s not about praising one charismatic leader but celebrating thousands of them. Not every song is politically charged (though many are), but calling this album Black Messiah creates a landscape where these songs can live to the fullest. Black Messiah is not one man. It’s a feeling that, collectively, we are all that leader.”
On December 15, 2014, R&B singer D’Angelo, and his band The Vanguard, released his third studio album Black Messiah. Consisting of twelve tracks, this was his first project in close to 15 years, dating back to his previous two albums, Voodoo (2000) and Brown Sugar (1995). Black Messiah entered the charts at a fever pitch in the racial and hegemonic imaginary as outlined in the aforementioned liner notes. Yet the album is inclusive on a full scale; uses the words “we,” “all,” and “us” throughout the synopsis; situates its message in a transnational frame—all of this suggests that although the album is not about race, it is an album invested in a manner of blackness. What might this mean? This class will wrestle with that question and hopefully pose others in turn, arguing that Black Messiah stages teachable moments in the sonic genealogy of the black aesthetic and radical traditions.
Each track from the album will shape the weekly class meetings as the foundation for provoking critical theory. With the class grounding itself in an album as the ur-text, what a better way to approach the album than to theoretically hit SHUFFLE and see what it has to say—the remix to an already mixed and mastered product! Likewise, we will think critically about, among other things, music and its utility as protest and affect, specifically melancholy; love and intimate community; nostalgia and projections of the future for those deemed perpetually homeless/in diaspora; and the album as homage.
Course Reading List:
- Beyoncé—“Sugar Mama”
- Bradley, “Reinventing Capacity: Black Femininity's Lyrical Surplus and the Cinematic Limits of 12 Years a Slave”
- Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return
- Butler, “Bloodchild”
- Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
- Cone, Black Theology and Black Power
- Coogler, Fruitvale Station
- Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose”
- Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom
- Du Bois, “Jesus Christ in Texas”
- Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
- Flack, “Ballad of the Sad Young Men”
- Foucault, “Madness, the Absence of Work”
- Hill, “I Find It Hard to Say (Rebel)”
- Holland, “(Black) (Queer) Love”
- Lindsey and Johnson, “Searching for Climax: Black Erotic Lives in Slavery and Freedom”
- McQueen, 12 Years a Slave
- Morrison, Beloved
- Moten, “Black Mo’nin’”
- Nyong’o, “Unburdening Representation”
- Price, “The Cultural Production of a Black Messiah”
- Rees, Pariah
- Schwenger, “Phenomenology of the Scream”•Spillers, “Moving on Down the Line: Variations on the African-American Sermon”
- Wilderson, III, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Participation - 10%
- Class Presentation (10-15 pp.) - 20%
- Critical Reflection (3-5 pp.) - 10%
- Annotated Bibliography for Syllabus Assignment - 20%
- Syllabus Assignment - 40%
ENG9400HF
*NON-CREDIT/CREDIT (0.25 FCE)*
Essential Skills Workshop Series
Gniadek, M
Although the Essential Skills Worship Series is mandatory for all PhD year-1 students and all PhD U year-2 students, who must enroll through ACORN, weekly meetings are open to all interested graduate students (MA or PhD), who do not need to enroll in order to attend any given session or sessions.
Term: F-TERM (September to December 2025)
Date/Time: Thursday 4:00 - 6:00 (2 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
The Essential Skills Workshop Series (ESWS) introduces the incoming cohort of doctoral students to the essential skills they will need in order to succeed in the PhD program in English and beyond. ESWS meets eight times each fall, approximately once a week for one hour and twenty minutes from mid-September through mid-November. Most meetings will feature a guest or guests, who, along with the faculty coordinator, will lead an open discussion for students embarking on the doctoral degree at U of T, moving into new pedagogic responsibilities, and entering wider professional and scholarly networks. Occasionally, there will be short, pre-circulated readings. Some sessions may provide students with tangible feedback on work (such as SSHRC proposals) they are already doing as part of their professionalization during the first year of the program.
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
The Essential Skills Workshop Series meets over 8 weeks in the Fall Term. Scheduling and topic of each meeting TBA.
Credit will be earned for attendance and for receiving and providing tangible feedback on a draft SSHRC proposal.
ENG9900HF
*NON-CREDIT/CREDIT (0.25 FCE)*
Teaching Literature
Hansen, J.
Required of and limited to PhD students in either Year 2 or 3 and PhD U students in either Year 3 or 4
Term: F-TERM (September to December 2025)
Date/Time: Tuesday 11:00 - 1:00 (2 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
Course Description:
This seminar, required of and limited to PhD students in either Year 2 or 3 and PhD U students in either Year 3 or 4, addresses the teaching of English literature at the university level. It is designed to provide the foundations for an informed, self-reflexive pedagogy and to help students develop effective methods for teaching English to undergraduate and graduate students. Guest faculty will discuss a range of pedagogical challenges and solutions.
Course Reading List:
TBA
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
TBA