Fall 2025 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 2025

More descriptions coming soon!

200-Level Courses

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

Major Writers: Gender, Culture, and Madness
EN 206.01 – T/TH 10:50 AM-12:05 PM
Dr. Melissa Girard

In this team-taught course, we will study the foundational connections between literature and psychology. Featuring literature and films by influential American authors who underwent psychiatric treatment, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and Susanna Kaysen, the course will explore the relation between creativity and mental illness. Throughout history and across cultures, the label of “madness” has often been applied to individuals whose gender identities, emotions, and behaviors fall outside social norms. Through case studies focused on topics including neurasthenia, gaslighting, depression, trauma, addiction, and body image, we will examine how gender constructs and values continue to shape definitions of mental health and illness. In addition to counting toward the second core English requirement, the course will also fulfill a Diversity-Justice course requirement and count toward the Gender and Sexuality Studies minor. Cross-listed as PY 270.01. Please note that both EN 101 and PY 101 are prerequisites for this course.

Major Writers: Classical Myth
EN 211.01 – M/W/F 11:00-11:50 AM
Dr. Aaron Palmore

In this course, we will examine Greek mythology through an assessment of primary sources—Hesiod’s Theogony, the Homeric Hymns, and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Myths are stories told for a purpose, and we will think about those potential purposes as much as the stories themselves. The guiding question of the course is: how does myth inform and challenge ideas about ethics and identity at the cultural and individual level? The stories we encounter will be about people figuring out who they are, what kind of world they live in, and what kind of world they want to live in. By reflecting on them, we can do the same! 

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

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.

 

Growing Up Modern
EN 280.01 – T/TH 9:25-10:40 AM
Dr. Mark Osteen

Childhood and adolescence are modern inventions. Building on that premise, this course explores how the literature of the past two-plus centuries has depicted childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. Among the questions we ask in the course are these: what trials and triumphs do children and adolescents endure on their way to adulthood? How do children, teens, and young adults respond to authority? How do unusual people (such as disabled youths) challenge norms and beliefs? Is coming of age the same across different cultures and ethnicities? How have representations and beliefs about childhood, adolescence and maturation changed over the decades? Readings will include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, short stories by James Joyce and others, and a selection of recent novels that may include Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Susan Nussbaum’s Good Kings Bad Kings, and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys. Each student will complete a research project and deliver an oral presentation. Students will also write two brief papers in which they reflect on their own identities and disabilities. Let’s grow up together!

300-Level Courses

Shakespeare: History & 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. 

Topics in Victorian Literature
EN 361.01 – T/TH 4:30-5:45 PM
Dr. Gayla McGlamery

American Lit to the First World War
EN 366.01 – T/TH 1:40-2:55 PM
Dr. Sondra Guttman

The United States is a nation famously founded on the power of dissent. What can American literature tell us about protest and power, about the path from narration to positive social transformation? This semester we’ll explore expressions and depictions of this American impulse, tracing its contradictions and complexities and reflecting on its implications for U.S. society today.  

We’ll explore dissenting literature around the topics of abolition, feminism, Indigenous rights and worker rights. Readings are by a few writers you may be familiar with (Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau) and many others that you’ve probably not heard of (Harriet Jacobs, Zitkala Sa, William Apess, Sui Sin Far). A past student reflected: 

I’ve never had a class like this before, where we focus on dissenting voices that center marginalized identities. The ability to bring the subaltern voices to the center is something that I will carry with me in future classes. Discussing...all the concepts we talked about this semester is something that we can do to ameliorate the world around us in a tangible way. 

Requirements include blog posts, collaborative discussion leadership, one close reading essay, a midterm exam, and choice of final research essay or exam. This course fulfills the 19th century literature requirement for the EN major and the Diversity course requirement for graduation.   

400-Level Courses

Seminar in Early American Lit
EN 432.01 – M/W/F 10:00-10:50 AM
Dr. Stephen Park

The State of Maryland’s official website recounts the story of the first “settlers” arriving in Maryland in 1634. But what does it mean to settle a place? What do the narratives of settlement tell us about the people who were already there and then found themselves being “settled”? What do these narratives tell us about the people who arrived in America and the way they saw themselves? The literature of Early America often featured narratives of settlement as a way to assert the idea that European colonization was inevitable and a mark of progress. This course sets out to un-settle these narratives by centering other literary voices and other possibilities for the Americas.

Seminar in Lit Topics before 1800: Medieval Men, Masculinity, and Violence
EN 439.01 – T/TH 3:05-4:20 PM
Dr. Kathy Forni

Toxic masculinity is in the news again, as it has been intermittently for the past ten years. Some contemporary activist groups invoke the Middle Ages as a time when men were free to act “naturally” by freely exerting their dominance and aggression. Theorists suggest that expressions of hypermasculinity are in reaction to men perceiving that they are losing ground or power—socioeconomically and politically. This course looks at men (and a woman, Joan of Arc) between 750-1500 and how they both used violence to exert their social identity, and were used by those in power to perpetuate a religious or feudal status quo in the name of social stability.

Texts will probably include: Beowulf, Song of Roland, Ibn Fadlan's “Account of the Rus,” Chretien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, Njals’ Saga, Arabian Nights, The Trial of Joan of Arc

Honors Seminar: Blue Notes: The Literature of Jazz
EN 470.01 – T/TH 12:15-1:30 PM
Dr. Mark Osteen

Honors Seminar. By invitation only.
That great sage Dizzy Gillespie once asked, “To be or not to bop?” Answer: to be bop. By the end of this course, you will do just that.

As Ken Burns showed us twenty years ago, jazz music has a distinguished history. What he didn’t reveal is that there is also a history of writers representing and imitating the music’s dynamic emotions and virtuoso techniques. This course will explore the many ways that jazz has inspired literature. We’ll follow its migration northward from New Orleans, with brief stops at some stations—swing, bop, cool, Afro-Cuban, and free—that it passed along the way. We’ll visit with the alleged inventor of jazz, Buddy Bolden, in Michael Ondaatje’s fascinating collage novel, Coming Through Slaughter; we’ll stride through poetry by Black writers such as Langston Hughes (Montage of a Dream Deferred, Ask Your Mama), Amiri Baraka, and others; we’ll swing to short stories by authors such as Eudora Welty and James Baldwin; we’ll call and respond to August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, nod our heads to the autobiography of iconic singer Billie Holiday, sight-read cool novels by James Weldon Johnson (Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man), Dorothy Baker (Young Man with a Horn), and one about a closeted trans trumpeter by the Afro-Scottish writer Jackie Kay. We will spend some time discussing how jazz artists have led the way in protesting against racial injustice and show how Latin jazz emerged and became a dominant form. And of course we will listen to loads of music by artists ranging from Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker to Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and contemporary artists to trace how jazz has influenced genres such as hip hop.

Students will post weekly on Moodle, give oral and musical presentations about their favorite artists or genres, write a research paper, and attend musical performances. Plus, in the spirit of jazz, students will experiment with different types of writing that reflect the music’s rich palette of hues and cries. Basic musical knowledge is an asset but is not required.

Ready to deedle a dee rop a wee boop bop? Ah-one, ah-two, ah-one, two, three, four. . . .

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

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. Cole 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.