Fall 2026 Graduate Courses
NOTE: All students who wish to take graduate courses must pre-register with Dr. Ian Cornelius, Graduate Programs Director at icornelius@luc.edu or (773) 508-2332.
Introduction to Graduate Study (ENGL 400)
Section: 001 #3313
Instructor: Bost, S.
3.0 credit hours lecture
M 07:00 p.m. – 09:30 p.m.
This course provides an overview of ideas, conventions, terms, and practices associated with graduate study in English. Rather than reproducing the status quo, however, we will interrogate each of the traditions we encounter and discuss a variety of possible future directions for the profession of English. I view this course as a collective project. Rather than transmitting knowledge in one direction, we will work from the ground up with the texts we read. Assignments will focus on disciplinary and methodological reflection, dialogue, speculation, and pedagogy. This course will begin with an overview text, How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies. Students will work in pairs to develop familiarity of a particular critical approach from our textbook. We will also spend time on the Norton Critical Edition of Edgar Allan Poe, our test case for historical, biographical, and bibliographical approaches. In the latter part of our course, students will research literary analytical projects to be presented in two different formats: a conventional essay as well as their choice of a digital, audio, three-dimensional, or a more creative response.
Required textbooks: Gregory Semenza’s Graduate Study for the 21st Century, Robert Dale Parker, How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies, and The Norton Critical Edition of the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
The Teaching of College Composition (ENGL 402)
Section: 001 #3945
Instructor: Bradshaw, M.
3.0 credit hours lecture
T 07:00 p.m. – 09:30 p.m., LSC
English 402 examines the practices of teaching college composition and the theories that support those practices. We begin by looking at how writing programs are positioned within English departments and within universities and then move to an exploration of major pedagogical movements in the discipline. As we explore different pedagogical approaches to teaching composition, students will work to develop their own teaching philosophies. Assignments include response papers, sample assignments, and a final syllabus and formal teaching statement. This course is required of doctoral students who will be teaching UCWR 110, and is strongly recommended for MA students who want to use their degree to teach composition courses.
History of the English Language (ENGL 406)
Section: 001 #5650
Instructor: Cornelius, I.
3.0 credit hours lecture
Th 07:00 p.m. – 09:30 p.m., LSC
The English language originated in migration and settlement. The area of settlement was subsequently named “England,” a region with a complex linguistic ecology where English developed into a kaleidoscope of local dialects. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the language began to spread beyond the British isles; during the same period the language contracted into a standard written form. Today English is diversifying again, on account of its worldwide use by some 2 billion people, most of whom are multilingual.
In this seminar we study the structure and history of this language, focusing on the period before 1800: Indo-European, Germanic, Old English, Middle English, and Early Modern English. Important developments in the period after 1800 will not be ignored, but they are not our focus: this course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement for the English MA and the Medieval and Renaissance requirement for the English PhD. Students whose primary areas of interest lie nearer the present day will nevertheless benefit. The linguistic concepts taught in this course have general application. Moreover, the famous irregularities in Present Day English — for example, “silent” letters, irregular verbs, and irregular plural nouns — are inheritances from the earliest periods of the history of the language.
Topics include speech sounds and writing systems; words as units of meaning and structure; variation, standardization, dialect, and register; diachrony and synchrony; language contact and multilingualism; sociolinguistic status and domains of use; technologies of communication; and tools for language study (the International Phonetic Alphabet, the Oxford English Dictionary, linguistic corpora).
Topics in Critical Theory (ENGL 420)
Section: 001 #4322
Instructor: Reddon, M.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 04:15p.m. – 05:30 p.m., LSC
Reading in Turns
In The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler tracks a philosophical figure “of turning” that metaphorizes how subjectivity is produced. The image of consciousness turned in or back on itself in Althusser, Hegel, and Nietzche (amongst other theorists) represents the blurry and indistinct boundary between the subject’s interiority and the external pressures shaping and delimiting its power. Amidst mounting political hostility to the humanities and a widespread impetus to de-skill students in its toolsets, this course returns to a broad set of texts often categorized as “Critical Theory” to examine key moments in philosophy and literary studies around the problem of subjectivity. This course will focus on demystifying theory for students by examining its methods of argumentation and the historical contexts informing its lines of inquiry. Turning back is necessary, this course argues, for understanding how we have arrived at our current historical moment and for finding ways of engaging with it.
Topics in Literary Studies (ENGL 430)
Section: 001 #5651
Instructor: Caronia, N.
3.0 credit hours lecture
W 7:00 p.m. – 9:30 p.m., LSC
The Italian American Criminal Body: Racialization / Erasure / Recovery
This graduate course explores the ways that Italian Americans and the Italian American ethnic experience have been represented in literature and film. We will begin our interrogation by examining nineteenth and early twentieth century dime novels and political cartoons for the antecedents of the Italian American criminal body, noting how this stereotype works in conjunction with stereotypes of other ethnic and racial communities. We will have the opportunity to explore the digital archives of Northern Illinois University’s Nickels and Dimes collection to learn about not only the Italian American criminal body, but also the resources necessary to create an expansive digital archive. For example, with the assistance of numerous grants, NIU has digitized more than 13,000 dime novels making theirs the largest digital collection anywhere in the world. In addition to examining the collection online, we may visit the library to see and discuss the collection with the director Matthew Short. We will trace the roots of the Italian American criminal body from American dime novels to twentieth century literature and film, reading Mario Puzo’s pulp fiction novel The Godfather (1969) and his earlier autobiographical novel The Fortunate Pilgrim (1965) alongside watching Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather I and II (1972 and 1974) while exploring Mario Puzo’s archives at Dartmouth University. At the same time, we’ll read scholarship about the Italian American experience and criminality in literature and film by scholars such as Pamela Bedore, Michael Demming, Fred Gardaphé, and Chris Messenger.
Topics in American Literature (ENGL 490)
Section: 001 #5652
Instructor: Staidum, F.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MW 4:15 p.m. – 5:30 p.m., LSC
Section Topic: Liberalism, American Literature, and the Black Radical Tradition
What does it mean to be "free"? This seminar interrogates that foundational American question by examining the entangled relationship between liberalism's promises and what Cedric J. Robinson theorized as “racial capitalism” or the global system through which capitalist accumulation and racial hierarchy emerged not as separate phenomena but a single, co-constitutive process. Liberalism, that capacious and contradictory philosophical tradition centered on the possessive individual, social contract, consent, and private property, did not emerge in spite of nor merely coexist with chattel slavery but was constructed and enacted through it. As philosophers from John Locke to Thomas Jefferson articulated theories of natural rights, free markets, and consensual government, they did so within societies built upon enslaved labor and racial hierarchy. While revolutionary documents like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen proclaimed universal freedom, they inscribed exclusion. Their abstract universals haunted by the bodies they could not acknowledge.
This course reads 18th- and 19th-century American literature as sites where liberalism's contradictions become visible, where the unspoken reliance of concepts like "the possessive individual," "consent," and "personhood" on racial subjugation is exposed, contested, and sometimes reinforced. If liberalism's history is one of expropriation of land, labor, and, as Silvia Federici demonstrates, the body itself, subjected to new regimes of control, then the Black radical tradition represents a fundamental rereading of freedom beyond the possessive individual. Through a diverse range of literature, such as Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1784), Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799), Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827), Melville's "Benito Cereno" (1855), Wilson’s Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859), Delany’s Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859-1862), Cable’s The Grandissimes (1880), Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don (1885), and Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901), alongside liberal philosophical writings to ask: How did literature of the period promulgate, critique, or revise liberal ideology? How do texts represent liberalism’s concepts like "consent," "personhood," and “progress” unspoken reliance on the exclusion of racialized others, for example, the production of "slaves," "savages," and "witches" as categories essential to capitalist development? How did enslaved and racially subjugated people theorize freedom from within unfree conditions, dreaming futures their oppressors could not imagine? What can the possessive individual mean to those who were legally possessed, their flesh (in Hortense Spillers's formulation) severed from the body's claims to personhood? And how might reading these texts help us understand the origins of social problems that persist in our own moment?
Notice: The information provided here, including course descriptions, instructor assignments, and meeting times, is for planning purposes only and is subject to revision at any time. Students should consult LOCUS for the official and most current course schedule.
NOTE: All students who wish to take graduate courses must pre-register with Dr. Ian Cornelius, Graduate Programs Director at icornelius@luc.edu or (773) 508-2332.
Introduction to Graduate Study (ENGL 400)
Section: 001 #3313
Instructor: Bost, S.
3.0 credit hours lecture
M 07:00 p.m. – 09:30 p.m.
This course provides an overview of ideas, conventions, terms, and practices associated with graduate study in English. Rather than reproducing the status quo, however, we will interrogate each of the traditions we encounter and discuss a variety of possible future directions for the profession of English. I view this course as a collective project. Rather than transmitting knowledge in one direction, we will work from the ground up with the texts we read. Assignments will focus on disciplinary and methodological reflection, dialogue, speculation, and pedagogy. This course will begin with an overview text, How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies. Students will work in pairs to develop familiarity of a particular critical approach from our textbook. We will also spend time on the Norton Critical Edition of Edgar Allan Poe, our test case for historical, biographical, and bibliographical approaches. In the latter part of our course, students will research literary analytical projects to be presented in two different formats: a conventional essay as well as their choice of a digital, audio, three-dimensional, or a more creative response.
Required textbooks: Gregory Semenza’s Graduate Study for the 21st Century, Robert Dale Parker, How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies, and The Norton Critical Edition of the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
The Teaching of College Composition (ENGL 402)
Section: 001 #3945
Instructor: Bradshaw, M.
3.0 credit hours lecture
T 07:00 p.m. – 09:30 p.m., LSC
English 402 examines the practices of teaching college composition and the theories that support those practices. We begin by looking at how writing programs are positioned within English departments and within universities and then move to an exploration of major pedagogical movements in the discipline. As we explore different pedagogical approaches to teaching composition, students will work to develop their own teaching philosophies. Assignments include response papers, sample assignments, and a final syllabus and formal teaching statement. This course is required of doctoral students who will be teaching UCWR 110, and is strongly recommended for MA students who want to use their degree to teach composition courses.
History of the English Language (ENGL 406)
Section: 001 #5650
Instructor: Cornelius, I.
3.0 credit hours lecture
Th 07:00 p.m. – 09:30 p.m., LSC
The English language originated in migration and settlement. The area of settlement was subsequently named “England,” a region with a complex linguistic ecology where English developed into a kaleidoscope of local dialects. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the language began to spread beyond the British isles; during the same period the language contracted into a standard written form. Today English is diversifying again, on account of its worldwide use by some 2 billion people, most of whom are multilingual.
In this seminar we study the structure and history of this language, focusing on the period before 1800: Indo-European, Germanic, Old English, Middle English, and Early Modern English. Important developments in the period after 1800 will not be ignored, but they are not our focus: this course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement for the English MA and the Medieval and Renaissance requirement for the English PhD. Students whose primary areas of interest lie nearer the present day will nevertheless benefit. The linguistic concepts taught in this course have general application. Moreover, the famous irregularities in Present Day English — for example, “silent” letters, irregular verbs, and irregular plural nouns — are inheritances from the earliest periods of the history of the language.
Topics include speech sounds and writing systems; words as units of meaning and structure; variation, standardization, dialect, and register; diachrony and synchrony; language contact and multilingualism; sociolinguistic status and domains of use; technologies of communication; and tools for language study (the International Phonetic Alphabet, the Oxford English Dictionary, linguistic corpora).
Topics in Critical Theory (ENGL 420)
Section: 001 #4322
Instructor: Reddon, M.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 04:15p.m. – 05:30 p.m., LSC
Reading in Turns
In The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler tracks a philosophical figure “of turning” that metaphorizes how subjectivity is produced. The image of consciousness turned in or back on itself in Althusser, Hegel, and Nietzche (amongst other theorists) represents the blurry and indistinct boundary between the subject’s interiority and the external pressures shaping and delimiting its power. Amidst mounting political hostility to the humanities and a widespread impetus to de-skill students in its toolsets, this course returns to a broad set of texts often categorized as “Critical Theory” to examine key moments in philosophy and literary studies around the problem of subjectivity. This course will focus on demystifying theory for students by examining its methods of argumentation and the historical contexts informing its lines of inquiry. Turning back is necessary, this course argues, for understanding how we have arrived at our current historical moment and for finding ways of engaging with it.
Topics in Literary Studies (ENGL 430)
Section: 001 #5651
Instructor: Caronia, N.
3.0 credit hours lecture
W 7:00 p.m. – 9:30 p.m., LSC
The Italian American Criminal Body: Racialization / Erasure / Recovery
This graduate course explores the ways that Italian Americans and the Italian American ethnic experience have been represented in literature and film. We will begin our interrogation by examining nineteenth and early twentieth century dime novels and political cartoons for the antecedents of the Italian American criminal body, noting how this stereotype works in conjunction with stereotypes of other ethnic and racial communities. We will have the opportunity to explore the digital archives of Northern Illinois University’s Nickels and Dimes collection to learn about not only the Italian American criminal body, but also the resources necessary to create an expansive digital archive. For example, with the assistance of numerous grants, NIU has digitized more than 13,000 dime novels making theirs the largest digital collection anywhere in the world. In addition to examining the collection online, we may visit the library to see and discuss the collection with the director Matthew Short. We will trace the roots of the Italian American criminal body from American dime novels to twentieth century literature and film, reading Mario Puzo’s pulp fiction novel The Godfather (1969) and his earlier autobiographical novel The Fortunate Pilgrim (1965) alongside watching Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather I and II (1972 and 1974) while exploring Mario Puzo’s archives at Dartmouth University. At the same time, we’ll read scholarship about the Italian American experience and criminality in literature and film by scholars such as Pamela Bedore, Michael Demming, Fred Gardaphé, and Chris Messenger.
Topics in American Literature (ENGL 490)
Section: 001 #5652
Instructor: Staidum, F.
3.0 credit hours lecture
MW 4:15 p.m. – 5:30 p.m., LSC
Section Topic: Liberalism, American Literature, and the Black Radical Tradition
What does it mean to be "free"? This seminar interrogates that foundational American question by examining the entangled relationship between liberalism's promises and what Cedric J. Robinson theorized as “racial capitalism” or the global system through which capitalist accumulation and racial hierarchy emerged not as separate phenomena but a single, co-constitutive process. Liberalism, that capacious and contradictory philosophical tradition centered on the possessive individual, social contract, consent, and private property, did not emerge in spite of nor merely coexist with chattel slavery but was constructed and enacted through it. As philosophers from John Locke to Thomas Jefferson articulated theories of natural rights, free markets, and consensual government, they did so within societies built upon enslaved labor and racial hierarchy. While revolutionary documents like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen proclaimed universal freedom, they inscribed exclusion. Their abstract universals haunted by the bodies they could not acknowledge.
This course reads 18th- and 19th-century American literature as sites where liberalism's contradictions become visible, where the unspoken reliance of concepts like "the possessive individual," "consent," and "personhood" on racial subjugation is exposed, contested, and sometimes reinforced. If liberalism's history is one of expropriation of land, labor, and, as Silvia Federici demonstrates, the body itself, subjected to new regimes of control, then the Black radical tradition represents a fundamental rereading of freedom beyond the possessive individual. Through a diverse range of literature, such as Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1784), Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799), Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827), Melville's "Benito Cereno" (1855), Wilson’s Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859), Delany’s Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859-1862), Cable’s The Grandissimes (1880), Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don (1885), and Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901), alongside liberal philosophical writings to ask: How did literature of the period promulgate, critique, or revise liberal ideology? How do texts represent liberalism’s concepts like "consent," "personhood," and “progress” unspoken reliance on the exclusion of racialized others, for example, the production of "slaves," "savages," and "witches" as categories essential to capitalist development? How did enslaved and racially subjugated people theorize freedom from within unfree conditions, dreaming futures their oppressors could not imagine? What can the possessive individual mean to those who were legally possessed, their flesh (in Hortense Spillers's formulation) severed from the body's claims to personhood? And how might reading these texts help us understand the origins of social problems that persist in our own moment?
Notice: The information provided here, including course descriptions, instructor assignments, and meeting times, is for planning purposes only and is subject to revision at any time. Students should consult LOCUS for the official and most current course schedule.