Graduate Courses, Spring 2027

Visit the English Courses page to view graduate seminars offered in previous semesters. Class meeting locations are subject to change.  Consult the University Registrar for an explanation of the class period abbreviations.

Course #	Time(s)	Course title	Instructor
CRW 6130	W 9-11	Fiction Writing	Leavitt
CRW 6166	R 9-11	Studies in Literary Form	Akpan
CRW 6331	M 9-11	Verse Writing	Mlinko
ENG 6075	T 9-11	Literary Theory: Issues	Conners
ENG 6138	T 9-11 / R 9-11	Studies in the Movies	Ray
ENG 7960	R 6-8	Prospectus / Dissertation in the Humanities	Schorb
LIT 6236	F 6-8	Postcolonial Studies	Rosenberg
LIT 6358	T 6-8	Theoretical Approaches to Black Cultural Studies	Saunders
LIT 6856	W 9-11	Cultural Studies: Interventions	Bianchi
LIT 6856	W 6-8	Cultural Studies: Interventions	Galvan
LIT 6934	M 6-8	Variable Topics	Ulanowicz

Course Descriptions

CRW 6130

Fiction Writing
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
Uwem Akpan

This is a rich course on the forms and styles select African writers have employed to tell the complex stories of their continent.  It is not a history course but an attempt to expose the students to how key historical events and the concerns of different eras have been captured by creative writers.  The teacher and students will take turn to present selected literary texts; the students shall also write a short historical fiction.

CRW 6331

Verse Writing
Ange Mlinko

This is an intensive poetry writing workshop for graduate students in the MFA program in Creative Writing. Readings will consist of poems by British, Irish, and American poets from the mid-twentieth century to present day. Assignments will follow an imitative model, and recitation/memorization will also be required. 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.

ENG 6075

Literary Theory: Critical Latinx Studies
Tommy Conners

This seminar explores how Latinx Studies asks questions, offers answers, and sustains debate. To do so, we consider central theoretical conversations from the vantage of Latinx cultural and theoretical production, relating to issues like criticism and historicism, canonicity and representation, difference and desire, aesthetics and politics, and identity and interpretation. Since such ideas have long animated critical thought in general, our primary focus is how Latinx studies takes them up, reforms them, and is reformed by them. Necessary for this primary focus is a secondary focus that traces the evolution of Latinx intellectually and institutionally, engaging various stages we might broadly describe as: movements to establish field formations beyond (or against) English and literary studies departments (1960-1980s); deconstructing subjects of study through the advent of feminism, queer theory, Cold War interventionism, and trans-american frameworks (1980-2000s); turning to performance, affect, and form in the face of multicultural neoliberalism (2000-2018); and weighing the politics of present, past, and future in the wake of paradigm shifts towards Latinx modernisms, “cancellation,” and Latinx methods. On the whole, this seminar equips students with detailed insights into the ways Latinx Studies has deepened and advanced intellectual thought in North and Latin American academies

ENG 6138

Studies in the Movies: Philosophy and the Cinema’s Questions
Robert Ray

The last decade has seen an increased interest in the relationship of philosophy to issues raised by the cinema.  Many (but not all) of these concerns descend from the late Stanley Cavell, a Harvard philosophy professor, whose subjects included not only Emerson and Wittgenstein, but also screwball comedies and Cary Grant.  Cavell asserted that the movies he cared most about often engaged in their own philosophical work, and we should allow them to teach us what they know.

In this course, we will use philosophers (Plato, Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Cavell) to take up questions that films make us think about.  What counts as acting?  How would we teach a child to distinguish between documentary and fiction?  Does it matter what an actor is thinking about when he or she performs a scene?  How do a filmmaker’s choices affect our response to a movie?  Why can the same script yield entirely different results in the hands of different directors or when spoken by different actors?  How can we tell whether someone is correctly following a rule?  How does pretending related to acting, lying, courtship?  Can you pretend to be yourself?  For what things is photography more useful than painting?

This course doesn’t require a philosophy background.  Most of the readings are relatively short and written in non-technical language.  In fact, one of the course books, Gareth Matthews’s Dialogues with Children, involves discussing philosophical questions with ten-year-olds.

Movies will include People on Sunday, Close-Up, 1001 Grams, Anatomy of a Murder, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, Blow-Up, Vertigo, The Rules of the Game, and It Happened One Night. Assignments: (1) bi-weekly two-page papers, responding to prompts distributed the week before; (2) a final four-page paper; (3) class participation.

ENG 7960

Prospectus and Dissertation in the Humanities
Jodi Schorb

This three-credit course was developed in response to UF’s five-year degree timeline in order to provide guidance, accountability, and structure at a crucial juncture for doctoral students: the period between coursework and ABD status. The PhD-seeker faces a sudden structural shift, moving from a regulated environment of seminars and deadlines to an open-ended period that can stall their momentum while also freeing up space to think, conceptualize, and create. 
The course will provide guidance, accountability, and professional development to doctoral students preparing for qualifying exams, writing a research prospectus, and finalizing a dissertation chapter and/or other project-specific qualifying exam materials (DH projects, film, multimedia projects, etc.). Students can expect to complete or make substantial progress on the following goals by the end of the semester: 

• A polished dissertation prospectus. 
• Drafted preliminary exam/project materials including required dissertation chapter(s).
• An external grant or fellowship application(s) to fund a targeted portion of their research project.
• A sustainable daily or weekly academic writing routine as well as writing support.

As finding time to write is also a challenge, a portion of the 3-hour seminar block will be allocated to writing support.

LIT 6236

Postcolonial Studies: Postcolonial Literature and Decolonial Ecology
Leah Rosenberg

Elizabeth Deloughrey has succinctly stated, “There is no other region in the world that has been more radically altered in terms of human and botanic migration, transplantation, and settlement than the Caribbean” (DeLoughrey et al.,1). Scholars such as Lisabeth Paravisini-Gebert,  Elizabeth Deloughrey, Mimi Sheller, and Malcom Ferdinand  share the view that the current climate crisis and larger notion of Anthropocene can only be understood in relation to and as a product of what Malcom Ferdinand calls “modernity’s colonial and environmental double fracture,” the inseparable history of colonial violence against humans (manifest in racism and patriarchy) and against the environment (based in anthropocentricism) (3).The apocalypse of human and non-human extinction and transformation of ecology, as Deloughrey states, has already happened in the Caribbean and began with European conquest. That climate crisis is now being felt and seen in the Global North. This course examines how Caribbean writers, artists, and scholars across the region have illuminated the intertwined realities of environmental and human exploitation in the Caribbean and how they have promoted activism and resistance. The course will focus on colonization and the plantation; infrastructure, extraction, and tourism; and hurricanes, other “natural disasters” and the climate crisis. It will include materials of interest to students in postcolonial and African Diaspora studies, children’s literature, comics studies, and film. The final project may comprise a scholarly essay, creative work, or digital humanities project. We will read a wide range of theorists and other scholars including those mentioned above as well as creative works, likely including: Myriam Chancy, What Storm What Thunder; Edwige Danticat, Anacoana: Golden Flower; Margarita Engle, Silver People; Esther Figueroa, Limbo and Fly me to the Moon; Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place and My Gardening Book; McCauley, Diana. Daylight Come; Claude McKay, Banana Bottom, and Songs of Jamaica; Rosaura Rodríguez, Temporada; Senior, Olive.  Gardening in the Tropics; Shakespeare, The Tempest;Eric Walrond, Tropic Death.

LIT 6358

Theoretical Approaches to Black Cultural Studies: Toni Morrison, A Cultural Architect
Catherine Saunders

“I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. I claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was”—Toni Morrison

This course critically engages the culture that emerges from Toni Morrison’s work as a novelist, essayist, and editor. The course challenges students to contemplate prose as pedagogy and ponder the intellectual nuance that etches together the poetics of the Morrisonian novel. I incorporate aural, written, and visual texts to survey the Morrisonian catalog and to examine the legacy that lingers. To culminate the course, students will produce a final project that, like Morrison’s work as an author and editor, fuses critical thought with creativity.

LIT 6856

Cultural Studies: The Visual Field between Algorithms, AI, and the Digital Image
Pietro Bianchi

According to Hany Farid, one of the world’s leading experts in digital forensics, it is becoming almost impossible to distinguish a photographic image from an AI-generated one: “Within a year or two, our whole visual system will be utterly useless.” But what exactly becomes “useless” when an image in which the real has left a material trace becomes indistinguishable from one artificially generated by a machine? What happens to our belief in images—and, more fundamentally, to our relationship with the real?

This seminar will investigate the transformations of the visual field over the past century, from photography and cinema to video, the digital image, algorithms, machine vision, and generative AI. For much of the twentieth century, photography and cinema seemed to possess a peculiar relation to reality: what Walter Benjamin called the “optical unconscious” promised to reveal something in the real that remained invisible to the naked eye. This strange power of the photographic image fascinated generations of filmmakers and theorists, from André Bazin and Jean-Luc Godard to Roland Barthes and Gilles Deleuze. The emergence of the digital image, however, marked a fundamental transformation of this relationship between image and reality, one that has become even more radical with the advent of generative AI. Has the photographic image – and the particular form of belief it sustained – come to an end?

Moving between philosophy, film and media theory, and contemporary visual culture, we will explore the philosophical and political consequences of a transformation that has taken us from the almost oracular power attributed to photography by modernism to Harun Farocki’s “operational images” – images produced by machines for other machines, often without any human spectator at all. Our readings will include among others Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Martin Heidegger, Vilém Flusser, Friedrich Kittler, Alexander Kluge, Harun Farocki, Mark B. N. Hansen, Alexander Galloway, Lev Manovich, Jonathan Beller and Matteo Pasquinelli.

Alongside these theoretical readings, we will ask what is happening to cinema – the medium in which, throughout the twentieth century, we perhaps most intensely believed in images – and whether its contemporary transformations signal not simply another chapter in its history, but the disappearance of cinema as we have known it. Films and moving-image works will include works by Steven Spielberg, Jean-Luc Godard, Hito Steyerl, Michael Haneke, Harmony Korine, Radu Jude, Jane Schoenbrun, Abbas Kiarostami, and David Cronenberg.

Course requirements include a weekly discussion post, an in-class presentation on one of the assigned readings, and a final theoretical paper.

LIT 6856

Cultural Studies: Comics and Archives
Margaret Galvan

Comics present unique challenges when it comes to archival preservation—for much of their early history, comics as a pop culture format were not regarded as worthy of preserving and many kinds of comics were created in disposable print formats and printed on acidic, low-quality paper. Thinking about comics in tandem with archives encourages us to examine the print history of comics and the varying physical (and digital) material forms that comics have engaged over time.

In this seminar, we will make use of UF’s special collections and their rich and diverse comics holdings—that range from early twentieth-century newspaper comics to more contemporary twenty-first century zines—and learn about other key physical and digital collections. We will read scholarly books and collections that make visible the archival recovery of rare comics and forgotten artists and learn about their different methods and approaches to archival recovery. Throughout the course, we will center our conversations around the material forms of comics and how that shapes where and how they can be preserved. When we think deeply about the conditions that shape comics and how they were made, it helps us understand with greater nuance the stories that they can tell. The major project will involve students writing seminar papers based on archival research into specific comics held in our special collections.

This course will be particularly useful for students with an interest in archival research, contemporary American literature, children’s literature, comics studies, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, marginalized histories and creators, book history, grassroots publishing, memoir studies, visual and popular cultures, etc.

LIT 6934

Variable Topics: Memory and History in Children’s Literature
Anastasia Ulanowicz

The child’s entrance into the world, as Marah Gubar has observed, is always belated: young people, she writes, are born into a world in which stories about who they are (and what they should become) are already in circulation (6). The task of children’s literature, then, involves introducing the young reader to — and suturing her firmly within — a social formation whose existence preceded her own.

Little wonder, then, that so many works of children’s literature have taken as their subject the (often idealized) past. In this course, then, we will study representations of memory and history in children’s literature. How do books for young people represent the – often traumatic – past to emerging generations? How do they draw on collective memory, and what is the relationship between memory and history? How does the child become a figure of memory, and how may works of children’s literature be considered “sites of memory?”

We will discuss these and other questions as we read studies in historical fiction, memory theory, and trauma theory alongside key works of global children’s literature. This course will involve group discussion, individual presentations, short response papers, and a final seminar project.