Fall 2026 Courses
Class meeting locations are subject to change. Consult the following page for an explanation of the class period abbreviations.
| Course # | Time(s) | Course title | Instructor |
|---|---|---|---|
| CRW 6130 | M 9-11 | Fiction Workshop | Leavitt |
| CRW 6166 | M 9-11 | Studies in Literary Form | Logan |
| CRW 6331 | T 9-11 | Verse Writing | Hofmann |
| ENC 7760 | F 6-8 | From Paper to Publication | Hegeman |
| ENG 6077 | W 6-8 | Literary Theory: Forms | Wegner |
| ENG 6138 | W 9-11 / SCR M 9-11 | Studies in the Movies | Mennel |
| ENG 6824 | R 3-5 | Proseminar in English | Harpold |
| ENG 6932 | W E1-E3 / SCR T 9-11 | Film and Video Production | Mowchun |
| LAE 6947 | T 6-8 | Writing Theories and Practices | Del Hierro |
| LIT 6236 | W 6-8 | Postcolonial Studies | Schueller |
| LIT 6358 | M 6-8 | Theoretical Approaches to Black Cultural Studies | Reid |
| LIT 6934 | T E1-E3 | Variable Topics | Gonzales |
Course Descriptions
CRW 6130
Fiction Workshop
David Leavitt
This is an intensive fiction writing workshop for graduate students in the MFA program in Creative Writing. Reading will consist of short novels, stories, and essays by a variety of writers, including (probably and among others) John Cheever, Penelope Fitzgerald, Grace Paley, Jean Rhys, Muriel Spark, and Glenway Wescott. All first- and second-year fiction MFA students will be automatically enrolled in this workshop, which is also open to poetry MFAs and English PhDs if space is available. If you are not a fiction MFA and are interested in taking the course, please contact me.
CRW 6166
Studies in Literary Form: Poetry
William Logan
TBA
CRW 6331
Verse Writing
Michael Hofmann
This is the graduate poetry workshop, MFA @ FLA. I will have mostly free assignments – soft cop here, no flaming hoops, no fantastical obstacle courses – and we will read (I am thinking, just now, at the very beginning of the year, and subject to re-thinking) two British poets and two Americans, Isabelle Baafi and Paul Farley, and Sylvia Plath and Frederick Seidel.
ENC 7760
From Paper to Publication
Susan Hegeman
This course has two goals: to demystify the process of academic publishing and to give you the time and resources to turn a seminar paper or conference presentation into an academic article and submit it for publication. You will learn about the practicalities of academic publishing, such as how to find publishing venues that best align with your goals and interests, how the submission and evaluation process works, how to identify and avoid predatory journals, the pros and cons of open access, and how to understand journal impact factors and rating systems. You will also develop your skills in developmental editing and revision, focusing especially on how to provide meaningful and professional feedback to others, identifying the audience for your work, strengthening your argument, and tailoring your article to a publication venue.
ENG 6077
Literary Theory: Allegory, Allegoresis, and the Art of Reading
Phillip Wegner
A half-century ago, the literary critic Morton W. Bloomfield observed, “The problem of interpretation is the problem of allegory. . . . Allegory is, in this sense, that which conquers time, that which perpetually renews the written word.” However, even today, because allegory and allegorical reading, or allegoresis, open up for any literary work or visual text onto the possibility of multiple, seemingly competing interpretations—the perpetual renewal celebrated by Bloomfield—other contemporary readers find a deep threat in such practices. In our class, we will make the case for allegoresis as foundational for any practice of creative reading. We will do so through a careful engagement with a number of different kinds of readings, moving back and forth between major theoretical statements and literary and film examples. At the heart of our course will be the most significant recent examination of allegory and allegoresis in Fredric Jameson’s late masterpiece Allegory and Ideology (2019). We will begin with Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (2007) and two exemplary allegorical texts in Walter Scott’s “The Two Drovers” (1827) and James Cameron’s Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). Our attention will then turn to some crucial works of post-Second World War literary criticism: Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953); Northrup Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957); Angus Fletcher’s Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964); essays by Bloomfield, A. J. Greimas, and Paul De Man; and Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981). The next section of the semester will be taken up with readings of major allegorical texts, including Dante Alighieri’s Inferno (early 14th c), William Langland’s Piers Plowman (c. 1370-1386), and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book I (1590), before we turn our attention to Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology. We will then conclude with engagements with more recent allegorical fiction and film by, among others, Mary Shelley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Joyce, Ted Chiang, Denis Villeneuve, and Colson Whitehead. For the final seminar paper, students will be asked to develop an original four-level allegorical reading of any text of interest or a similar project germane to their goals in our graduate programs.
ENG 6138
Studies in the Movies: Old Media / New Media
Barbara Mennel
We will begin with a set of questions regarding the status and relation of media archaeology and film history. The course situates “new media” in the context of the history of virtual realities, spatial illusions, immersion and interaction before the advent of digital technology. The course will cover shadow plays, optical toys, and devices of curiosity. We will then turn to theorizations of digital cinema and conclude with reflecting on new media’s processes of remediation and immediacy.
Module One on Media Archeology and framing conceptions of media might include the Journal for Cinema and Media Studies’ special issue “But Is It Media?” (Fall 2025, 65.1), Thomas Elsaesser’s Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema, Jussi Parikka’s What is Media Archaeology?, excerpts from Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan’s New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, and Marina Hassapopoulou’s Interactive Cinema: The Ambiguous Ethics of Media Participation.
Module Two on Virtual Realities and Immersion before Digital Cinema might include Massimo Riva’s Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analog World, Paul Fyfe’s Digital Victorians: From Nineteenth-Century Media to Digital Humanities, Meredith A. Bak’s Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children’s Media Culture, Oliver Gaycken’s Devices of Curiosity: Early Cinema & Popular Science, and Richard Koeck’s The Art of Spatial Illusion: Immersive Encounters between People, Media, and Place.
Module Three on Film, Digital Cinema, and New Digital Cinema might include D.N. Rodowick’s The Virtual Life of Film, Jason Sperb’s Flickers of Film: Nostalgia in the Time of Digital Cinema, Holly Willis’s New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image, and Steven Shaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect.
Module Four on Remediation and Immediacy might include Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s Remediation: Understanding New Media and Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy. Or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism.
The seminar might include a visit to the special collections of Smathers Libraries and collaboration with the Harn Museum’s planned exhibition (for Spring 2027) entitled “Color and Code: From Program to Precision.” While assignments might be adapted to such collaborations, the standard expectation is consistent preparation, participation, a book review, an abstract for a final research paper, an informal presentation on the final project, and a 12-18pg final research paper.
ENG 6824
Proseminar in English: Environmental Humanities
Terry Harpold
An introduction to best practices in research, teaching, and out-of-classroom activities in the environmental humanities (EH), with emphasis on methods that have proven effective for introducing undergraduate humanities students to the science of planetary climate transformation and to literary media (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction) and visual media (graphic novels, film) addressing the place of the human in a more-than-human world. Students will read widely from the emerging literature in ecopoetic and ecocritical pedagogy and will develop practical solutions for adding EH materials and approaches in their existing scholarly and teaching emphases (critical method, historical period, genre).
ENG 6932
Film and Video Production: Originality and Adaptation in Film
Trevor Mowchun
It is no secret that some of the most compelling and enduring films throughout history are adaptations of prior texts. What this means is that advances in film art are often reached through the embrace of other art forms (predominantly literature)—an embrace of what we might call the “non-cinematic.” We will attempt to untangle this apparently paradoxical phenomenon in a number of ways across theory and practice: by exploring some general theories of artistic originality that grapple with the highly subjective, strangely objective, and often indescribable mysteries of “the creative process”; by identifying the concept of adaptation as a mode of creativity that is tied to the aesthetic vitality and thematic timeliness of film, a way of working that is arguably more instrumental for film than for any other artform; by considering some traditional and experimental methods of film adaptation to help pave the way for the development of our own ideas concerning the complex interaction between originality and adaptation in film. Throughout these investigations we will continually ask ourselves if and how “the spirit” of a literary (and, in some cases, non-literary) text can be adapted such that its ideal form is found in film and, in turn, how external sources can serve to reignite the evolving spirit of film despite its tendency towards idle slavishness to convention and redundancy.
The proposition—that adaptation is the most vital path to originality in film—will be put to the test using two methodologies: “case studies” and “filmmaking.” Case studies will feature a comparative study of a film adaptation and its source text(s). We will track the transformative journey of the film from literary source to script (in some cases) to screen. Adaptation methods of particular interest to us will include faithful vs. transgressive adaptation, modernization, piecemeal adaptation, multiple source adaptation, and interdisciplinary adaptation. Short and feature-length films will be screened to exemplify both the possibilities and pitfalls of cinematic adaptation. Films with no ostensible ties to outside source material (i.e., films which are, or claim to be, “totally original”) will also be considered for the sake of comparison, and most likely debunked. The filmmaking section of the seminar will require students to embark upon their own process of cinematic adaptation by choosing (if possible) a yet un-adapted literary work—ideally a short story, prose piece or poem (novellas may also be considered with caution)—and composing a filmable screenplay based on it, one that remains true to the “spirit” of the source, or betrays it, or transforms it, or perhaps some sublime alchemy of all three acts of creation. The source material will become raw material to be molded into something new—something that surpasses the original in some way and rethinks it for the present age. One or perhaps all of these projects will then be made into a short/medium-length film, inviting students to experience the various phases or “internal adaptations” of the filmmaking process beyond screenwriting.
LAE 6947
Writing Theories and Practices
Victor Del Hierro
This course introduces you to perspectives on writing and the teaching of writing in colleges and universities. It aims to help you imagine and invent different ways of teaching writing (in relation to reading and theory) across teaching contexts. This course also aims to help you develop different pedagogical approaches for teaching writing in relation to invention, production, and distribution of knowledge. You can expect to walk away with theories to inform your pedagogical rationale but also research and invention skills to put those theories into practice in the classroom. To assist in this learning, you will practice designing and implementing heuristics, embark on your own pedagogical research project, and design a course of your choice, all of which will help you gain experience teaching in multiple areas and at multiple levels of English education
LIT 6236
Postcolonial Studies: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Resistance, and Contemporary Literature
Malini Schueller
Settler colonialism has often been marginalized within postcolonial studies which have focused largely on colonization and decolonization in places such as Kenya, Nigeria, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, or French Indochina. This course attends to the different theories, practices, and literatures of settler colonialisms–marked by large populations of Europeans who have moved to places not simply as functionaries of a colonial power but to live permanently while enjoying the privileges of a ruling race. While the structures of some settler colonialisms have been dismantled and others still continue, the effects of settler colonialism are present to date. Indeed, one of the most important global connections of the twenty-first century is that of indigenous resistance against settler colonialism. North American Indian, Hawaiian, Palestinian, Maori, and Kashmiris speak a similar language of dispossession and activism and are often involved in advocacy campaigns that connect different indigenous spaces. This course focuses on the literatures and theories of indigeneity and settler colonialism by focusing on four very different sites: US North America, Hawai’i, South Africa/Algeria, and Palestine. We will study the specific constructions of race in different settler colonial contexts and the intersection of colonial racism and gender. We will read works by both the colonized and settlers and the in order to understand questions of indigeneity, sovereignty, racial politics, occupation, nationalism, the politics of recognition, and revolutionary solidarity. We will study the current, often contentious theoretical debates about the different politics of settler colonial studies and indigeneity studies and some conversations between indigenous and environmental studies.
The course will begin with a brief foray into nineteenth-century literature of settler colonialism and native resistance in the US which will serve as a foundation to reading the contemporary literature and theory. We will put into conversation twenty-first century contemporary global literature of resistance to settler colonialism and twentieth century literature. We will also read the works of theorists such as Patrick Wolfe, Jodi Byrd, Craig Womack, Kehaulani Kanui, Achille Mbembe, Rob Wilson, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Ghassan Hage, and Eyal Weizman.
Possible texts include Sherman Alexie Indian Killer, Liliokalani Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, Lois Ann Yamanaka Blu’s Hanging, Kamel Daoud The Mersault Investigation, Albert Camus The Stranger, Raja Shehade Palestinian Walks, Susan Abulhawa Mornings in Jenin and Ibtisam Azem The Book of Disappearance.
LIT 6358
Theoretical Approaches to Black Cultural Studies: James Baldwin Novels, Plays, Films, and Intersectionality
Mark Reid
This course employs an interdisciplinary approach that requires students to familiarize themselves with James Baldwin’s literary and sociopolitical writings. The course expects that students apply continental and American theories in their analysis. Such theorizing will borrow from continental and American scholars as Jean Baudriard, Gille Deluze, Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Fanon, and American theorists as Frank B. Wilderson III, Jared Sexton, Saidiya Hartman, Calvin Warren, and essayists like Ta-Nehisi Coates. Class discussion and written work will discern whether there exists evidence of Afro-Pessimism and or postNegritude moments in Baldwin’s oeuvre that easily dismisses post-racial fantasies and the machination of neo-liberal gestures. The seminar critically surveys James Baldwin’s writings, lectures, and selected biographies that explore Baldwin’s life in the United States, France, and Turkey. Baldwin was engaged in the sociopolitical world that surrounded and sometimes consumed his artistic and moral energies. He was active in the U.S. Civil Rights movement and international concerns about the construction of nation, race, and sexuality. One critic wrote of Baldwin in these words: “Following publication of Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin’s literary star approached its peak during the turbulent 1960s. His burgeoning role as celebrity, prophet, and leader heaped an unsustainable amount of pressure and responsibility onto his slight frame in an American landscape that doubly punished Baldwin for being both (B)lack and (G)ay, and he often turned to Turkey for sanctuary.” This course will reveal the artistry, compassion, and moral commitment of one of America’s greatest writers. Students will critically study how James Baldwin fared as an American writer and social critic. Students will also consider how critical theory might reveal or deny the persistence of anti-Black violence in words and deeds. Class discussion will consider how Baldwin imaginatively exposed and fervently articulated the rejuvenation of moral, ethical, and Christian awareness as an endgame.
LIT 6934
Variable Topics: User Experience Research
Laura Gonzales
A user experience is a person’s overall perception of their interaction with a product or service. This can include how a mobile app, website, museum exhibit, book, email, and more makes an individual feel and how it motivates them to act and engage. User Experience research is the systematic process of analyzing user experiences to help improve products, services, texts, and more to better fit audience needs and expectations.
In this course, you will gain: 1) an introduction to user experience research methods and studies; 2) hands-on practice developing your own user experience research study based on your interests; and 3) professional development guidance for how you can apply user experience research in your academic and non-academic work.
Each student will undertake a semester-long project where they use what they learn in the class to select appropriate research questions, apply appropriate research and analysis methods, and transform their analyses into practical and strategic recommendations for designing user experiences.