Topics courses are taught seminar style, with substantial reading, research, and writing included.

Topics Courses – Spring 2025

ENGL 169T – The Mystical Alliance: Poe, Corman and Price (Skeen)

Throughout the 1960s, the collaboration between the director Roger Corman and the actor Vincent Price resulted in some of the most successful film adaptations of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Produced by American International Pictures, these films can be viewed as criticisms of hegemonic social hierarchies. In this class, we will study Poe’s stories and Corman’s films while analyzing their relevance to issues such as class, xenophobia, and substance abuse.

ENGL 250T – Archives of Colonialism: Text, Map, Nature (Garzon Mantilla)

This seminar investigates how various practices of literacy across media have shaped the archives of colonialism and fostered diverse forms of modern literature in the Anglophone world and Latin America. The course is organized into three units: 1) the colonial appropriation of non-Western forms of writing and the long legacy of Orientalist literature; 2) the cartographic imagination of Africa and the history of mapping the continent; 3) how the natural environment of the Amazon became a palimpsest of deterritorialized forms.

ENGL 250T – Medieval Queer (Weston)

Reading and analysis of medieval texts that feature premodern engagements with LGBTQ people and themes we often think of as primarily modern and/or postmodern.  It will address the problematics of doing queer history before the modern world and the possibilities and difficulties of using modern terms and definitions. It will also introduce the recent construction of a queer philology (as well as history and historiography) that questions the heteronormative ideologies inherent in studies of manuscript transmission; sources and analogues; and linguistic and literary histories.  

Seminars in English – Spring 2025

ENGL 193 – Multi-Ethnic War Stories (Najmi)

This course will focus on representations of war in contemporary multiethnic U.S. literature. Contemporary warfare has obliterated the conventional divisions between battlefront and homefront, soldier and civilian. This has revealed the porousness of the lines between the global and the local, “they” and “us.” It has also rendered obsolete the traditional perception of war stories as masculine terrain. Through diverse readings, we will explore how gender, race, and class affect the experience and literary representation of war; how war travels through time and generations, defining personal and collective identity. How does language shape our response to any given war? And how do writers transmute their personal or ancestral experiences of war into aesthetic artifacts? Readings will include a variety of genres: memoir, fiction, poetry, comics, and film.

ENGL 193 – Climate Change Literature (Gordon)

This course will examine the emergence and (pre)history of climate change fiction/“cli-fi.” Spanning novels, poetry, nature writing, autobiography, film, music, and short stories, “cli-fi” takes up the gendered and raced histories of the human-nature divide; the imbrication of industrialism, capitalism, and planetary destruction; and connections between activism, the imagination, and justice for human and non-human life. Readings include contemporary works by Octavia Butler, Indra Sinha, Tommy Pico, Donna Haraway, and Sylvia Wynter, canonical texts in the environmentalist tradition, and case studies such as Standing Rock, Bhopal, and Flint. 

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• Bulldogs for Recovery — Helps students learn healthier ways to cope with substance use, safe partying, etc.
• Career Development Center — Gives students a one-stop shop for job opportunities and professional development.
• Dream Success Center — Helps students who may have mixed or undocumented immigration statuses.
• Learning Center — Provides students with tutoring, supplemental instruction, academic success coaching, etc.
• Let's Talk Counseling — Gives students easy access to confidential and anonymous mental health counseling.
• Money Management Center — Helps students learn techniques for budgeting, credit, and debt management.
• Student Cupboard — An on-campus food pantry that provides students with free food and hygiene products.
• Student Health and Counseling Center — A full, high-quality on-campus health facility for students.
• Victim Advocacy Services — Provides confidential support to students impacted by interpersonal violence. 
• Writing Center — Helps students with their writing assignments, from start to finish.