Fall 2026 EN Course Descriptions

English majors and minors are encouraged to complete the advising template (PDF) before meeting with their academic advisors. Those who choose to register online might consider filling out the document in Word, saving it to a file, and then e-mailing it to their advisors as part of the "permit to register" request.

English Department Course Offerings - Fall 2026

200-Level Courses

Texts and Contexts: Afrofuturism
EN 202.01 – T/TH 1:40-2:55 PM
EN 202.02 – T/TH 3:05-4:20 PM
Dr. Trevon Pegram

Majors Writers: Classical Myth
EN 211.01 - M/W/F 10:00-10:50 AM
Dr. Aaron Palmore

People turning into birds, flowers, and trees! Human hybrids like centaurs, harpies, and the one‐and‐only minotaur! We’ll see all this and more in our core text, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the unexpectedly epic poem written while Augustus was finalizing the transition of the Roman world from Republic to Empire. Ovid’s mythological compendium hangs together loosely as a narrative, but thematically it’s ultimately a poem about power: who gets it, how do they wield it, and what happens to those who suffer? We’ll spend one week on each of the 15 books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which will give us plenty of time to complement our reading with consideration of literary, artistic, and musical responses to the poem from the past 2000 years.

Comic Books as Literature, TV & Cinema
EN 220.01 - M/W 4:30-5:45 PM
Dr. Brett Butler

The impact of comic books, graphic novels, and manga have had on popular culture is massive. However, it is only in the last couple decades that these mediums have become the topic of proper scholarly debate and criticism. This course exposes students to a variety of comic books and graphic novels and teaches them how to discuss them academically. Whether they are dedicated comic book fans or mildly interested newcomers, students learn to develop a more profound appreciation for visual storytelling.

Justice & Hope: Writing the U.S.
EN 265.01 - M/W 3:00-4:15 PM
Dr. Hunter Plummer 

This course fulfills the Diversity-Justice Course Requirement and other course requirements.

In a moment where many in the United States of America feel hopeless or that justice is an unattainable, intangible dream, this course approaches American literature through a lens of protest. We will explore how a diverse collection of film, theater, prose, poetry, and song can reveal the ways literature reflects, informs, and changes the nation’s history and the lives of its residents. Writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, Zitkala-Ša, Heidi Schreck, and John Waters show how social movements in this country’s history have sought or can seek to improve the lives of oppressed people and communities. Sometimes through incremental change, sometimes through radical direct action, the protests depicted in these works offer a hope that, one day, justice will be found.

U.S. Literature: Imagining the Nation
EN 266.01 - T/TH 9:25-10:40 AM
Dr. Sondra Guttman

Literature and Climate Change
EN 267.01 - M/W/F 2:00-2:50 PM 
Dr. Stephen Park

Nearly everyone knows what climate change is and what the causes are. And yet, societies around the world continue to put carbon into the atmosphere and behave in ways that are, largely, unchanged. Why is that? Fiction writer and historian, Amitav Ghosh, describes our time as an era of “derangement,” one in which people’s understanding of the problem and their actions do not match because they are so invested in deep cultural narratives that doing something different is simply unthinkable. It is our task in “Literature and Climate Change” to explore those narratives.

This course asks the question—how did we get here? We will read a range of 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century fiction and poetry in order to consider the cultural desires that made carbon the “logical” way forward. The literature in our course will also grapple with the consequences of climate change for different members of society, and, in some cases, these books will help us imagine alternative ways of structuring the world. Texts will range from Mary Shelley and Henry David Thoreau to contemporary authors such as Nathaniel and N. K. Jemisin. “Literature and Climate Change” counts toward the Environmental Studies Major and Minor.

This is a Community-Engaged Learning course, and students will have the opportunity to volunteer with the non-profit organization, Blue Water Baltimore. This work is central to the issues of the course. By learning about and caring for Baltimore’s ecosystem, students will have a richer understanding of how the global issues in our course impact their own surroundings.

Growing Up Modern
EN 280.01 - T/TH 9:25-10:40 AM
Dr. Sondra Guttman 

300-Level Courses

Shakespeare: Histories & Tragedies
EN 310.01 - M/W 3:00-4:15 PM
Dr. Thomas Scheye

“He doth bestride the narrow world/ Like a colossus.” The way Cassius describes Julius Caesar can describe Shakespeare as well; his achievement towers over all other authors’ in our language. Shakespeare does more than write plays; he creates a world—one where the characters come alive for us and the language becomes part of our common inheritance as English speakers. This course focuses on Shakespeare’s history plays where that world is first defined and his mature tragedies where it finds it finest expression.  

Book, Edition, Archive
EN 344.01 - T/TH 9:25-10:40 AM
Dr. Gary Slack 

Jane Austen
EN 355.01 - T/TH 4:30-5:45 PM
Dr. Gayla McGlamery

Jane Austen turned 250 this past December 16th. While her novels were not bestsellers in her own time, from at least the late 19th-century to the early 21st, few author’s works have been so broadly embraced in popular culture as well as the academy. Austen’s alchemical combination of humor, social commentary, and romance has long attracted devoted fans and inspired countless imitators.

In this course, we’ll read portions of Austen’s letters and juvenilia, as well as the major novels. We’ll study the works within the historical context of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century reactions to revolutionary political and economic change and discuss the aspects of Austen’s style and subject matter that have made her works an enduring fascination for so many readers. Whether you’re a Janeite or simply Jane-curious, this course will have something for you. 

400-Level Courses

Honors Seminar Pre-1800: Reinventing Medieval
EN 430.01 - T/TH 1:40-2:55 PM
Dr. Kathleen Forni
By invitation only

In this course we’ll study how modern artists have adapted some medieval classics in order to render them palatable and relevant to modern audiences. To focus our comparative approach, we will use bits of adaptation theory, cultural studies, and medevialism (the study of how the Middle Ages is reimagined in contemporary culture). 

Medieval texts will include: Beowulf, Chretien de Troyes, Perceval, The Quest for the Grail, Dante’s Inferno, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and The Geste of Robin Hood. Modern versions will include: Gardner, Grendel; Niven and Pournelle, Inferno; Ishiguro, The Buried Giant as well as a few film adaptations.

Seminar in Literary Topics before 1800: Japanese Haiku & English Sonnets: Bashō & Shakespeare 
EN 439.01 - T/TH 12:15-1:30 PM
TBD

Seminar in African American Literature: August Wilson
EN 481.01 - T/TH 10:50 AM-12:05 PM
Dr. Trevon Pegram

Seminar in Modern Literature: Bohemianism
EN 483.01 - T/TH 3:05-4:20 PM
Dr. Melissa Girard 

“The grand work of Bohemianism in our own day in our United States, and the best proof of it, is the inability of the old-fogies to understand or see the meaning and tendency of our Bohemianism."
—D.D., The New York Saturday Press, June 16, 1860

Born in nineteenth-century Paris, bohemianism is a way of life, a philosophy based on rebellion from the mainstream. Disillusioned with conventional society, bohemians create alternative communities—subcultures—on the margins, where they may live and create art according to their own rules. Taking their cue from Paris and London, American bohemians in New York and San Francisco have given rise to some of the most innovative (and contentious) artistic experiments of the last 150 years, including modernism, feminism, and free love. This semester, we will immerse ourselves in the history and philosophy of bohemianism to understand the nature of their rebellions. Are bohemians really radicals or just pretenders? Our readings will begin with iconic bohemian works by Charles Baudelaire, Walt Whitman, and Oscar Wilde. We will then travel to New York’s Greenwich Village, where Edna St. Vincent Millay reimagined bohemia for the “New Woman”; Ernest Hemingway’s cosmopolitan bohemia, where the “Lost Generation” wandered aimlessly in the aftermath of World War I; Harlem’s cabarets, where jazz fueled new forms of artistic and political freedom; and San Francisco’s Beat subculture, where Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac popularized bohemianism like never before. We will analyze the forms and styles of art that arose from these bohemian subcultures and explore whether bohemianism offers a viable alternative to mainstream life.

Seminar in Film & Literature: Short Form Animation
EN 486.01 - W 6:00-8:30 PM
Dr. Nicholas Miller 

This course will explore short-form animation, a “hand-made,” craft-centered approach to visual art that focuses and intensifies meaning in a manner similar to—and different from—the literary short story. In considering animations of literary works by Dostoevsky, Kafka, Hans Christian Andersen, Emily Dickinson, Susanna Clarke, Diana Wynne Jones, Julio Cortazar, Eiko Kadono, Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. Le Guin, and others, we will explore what animation art has to teach us about the literary imagination.

Importantly, this is not an adaptation course. We will consider issues of visual translation, fidelity, and transformation, but our focus will be on exploring the influence of animation history on literary expression, examining animation’s often overlooked role in driving experiments with narrative, language, character development, and the use of metaphor.

Approaching literary texts through this atypical lens will enable us not only to appreciate them in new ways, but to understand how literary fiction works, in ways both similar to and different from other expressive forms.

EN 099 English Internships

Students may take one internship course for degree credit. The course counts as an elective, not as a course fulfilling requirements for an English major or minor. Students taking an internship course are responsible for locating the internship and must work at least ten hours per week. For-credit internships include biweekly meetings with Dr. Forni and other fellow interns, and students undertake a series of reflective and goal-setting activities that can be highly beneficial aspects of the career discernment process. Internships may be done locally in the Baltimore-Washington region or remotely, but written or electronic permission of the instructor is required and all arrangements for a spring semester internship must be made prior to the end of the drop/add period. Interested students should contact Dr. Forni (kforni@loyola.edu) , the departmental internship supervisor, before registration.