Undergraduate Courses, Spring 2027

Upper-Division (3000-4000)

Note: Course numbers listed in the table are linked to course descriptions below. Class meeting locations are subject to change. Consult the University Registrar for an explanation of the class period abbreviations. Visit the English Courses page to view undergraduate courses offered in previous semesters.

Course #	Class #	Time(s)	Room	Course title	Instructor
AML 3673	12689	T 4 / R 4-5	TUR 2336	Introduction to Asian American Literature	Schueller
AML 4170	26223	M W F 5	MAT 0113	Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics	Harpold
AML 4170	18992	M W F 8	MAT 0116	Race and Gender in Feminist Speculative/Gothic/Science Fiction	Hedrick
AML 4170	23117	T 5-6 / R 6	TUR B310	Afrofuturism	Mollenthiel
AML 4242	26303	T 7 / R 7-8	TUR 2333	Harlem Renaissance and Western Europe	Reid
AML 4242	27079	T 8-9 / R 9	TUR 1101	Harlem Renaissance	Mollenthiel
AML 4282	23047	T 5-6 / R 5	MAT 0012 / MAT 0002	Queer Lit Before Homosexuality	Schorb
AML 4311	26289	T 5-6 / R 6	TUR 2333	Langston Hughes Novels, Essays, Autobiography, Plays, and Films	Reid
AML 4453	26307	M W F 10	MAT 0113	Hurricanes and Literature in the American Tropics	Rosenberg
AML 4453	26225	T 4 / R 4-5	MAT 0115	Literature and Culture of the 1920s	Hegeman
CRW 3110	DEP – X	M 9-11	WEIM 2050	Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing	Deagler
CRW 3110	DEP-X	T 9-11	MAT 0014	Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing	Akpan
CRW 3310	DEP-X	W 8-10	AND 0032	Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing	Hofmann
C R W 4905	DEP-X	W 9-11	FLI 0101	Senior Advanced Fiction Workshop	Deagler
CRW 4905	DEP-X	R 9-11	FLI 0115	Senior Advanced Fiction Workshop	Akpan
ENC 3250	27059	ASNYCH	ONLINE	Professional Communication	Artiga
ENC 3250	27074	ASYNCH	ONLINE	Professional Communication	Gonzales
ENC 3414	26218	M W F 6	TUR 2334	Hypermedia	Del Hierro
ENC 4212	26217	M W F 4	MAT 0115	Professional Editing	Del Hierro
ENC 4260	26221	M W F 3	NANO 0115	User Experience Research	Gonzales
ENG 2820	20790	M W F 4	MAT 0117	What is the English Major?	Maioli
ENG 3011	26242	M W F 6	TUR 2322	Literature, Criticism and Society	Murchek
ENG 3011	26312	T 5-6 / R 6	ROL 0115	The Theorists: New Sophists	Sánchez
ENG 3121	23114	T 4 / R 4-5 / SCR M 9-11	TUR 2334 / ROL 0115	History of Film 1	Mennel
ENG 4015	17798	M W F 7	MAT 0116	Adventures in Psychoanalysis	Rudnytsky
ENG 4130	26203	T 7 / R 7-8 / R E1-E3	TUR 2334 / ROL 0115	Colonial and Postcolonial Cinema	Bianchi
ENG 4133	23046	T4 / R4-5	TUR 2322	Forgery, Phantoms, Film, Painting	Burt
ENG 4133	26228	T 5-6 / R 6	TUR 2322	Renaissance Literature in the Dark	Burt
ENG 4134	26236	T 5-6 / R 6 / M E1-E3	TUR 2334 / ROL 0115	Women and Film	Mennel
ENG 4135	26593	M W F 6	LAR 0310	Israel and French Cinema	Zachmann
ENG 4136	DEP-X	T E1-E3 / W E1-E3	ROL 0115	The Art of Filmmaking	Mowchun
ENG 4910	23152	T 7 / R 7-8	MAT 0115	Collaborative Research: Cultural Rhetorics	Chakma
ENG 4911	DEP-X	TBA	TBA	Undergraduate Research	TBD
ENG 4936	DEP-X	T 6-8	ONLINE	Honors Seminar: Lost Ladies: Turn of the 20th Century Women Writers	Smith
ENG 4936	DEP-X	R 6-8	MAT 0013	Honors Seminar: Affect Theory and Its Discontents	Conners
ENG 4940	DEP-X	TBA	TBA	English Internship	Maioli
ENG 4970	DEP-X	TBA	TBA	Honors Thesis	TBD
ENL 3122	26222	M W F 5	MAT 0117	Growing Up Victorian	Grass
ENL 4221	26310	M W F 8	MAT 0115	Milton’s Paradise Lost	Rudnytsky
LIT 3374	26226	T 4 / R 4-5	AND 0019 / FAC 0120	The Hebrew Bible as Literature	Kawashima
LIT 3400	27508	T 4 / R 4-5	MAT 0013	Black Femininity and Being: Analyzing Black Femininity from Page to Picture	Saunders
LIT 3400	20050	T 7 / R 7-8	FAC 0127	The Poetics of Justice: Law, Literature, and Film	Kligerman
LIT 4188	26193 (RES) and 26194 (UFO)	W 6-8	Online	Nation and Narration, or Nationalism and the Novel	Amoko
LIT 4188	26326	T 5-6 / R 6	MAT 0010 / MAT 0015	Literary and/as Science Fiction	Wegner
LIT 4194	26196 (RES) and 26198 (UFO)	M 6-8	Online	The Drama of Africa	Amoko
LIT 4233	16907	T 8-9 / R 9	TUR 2333	Postcolonial Theory	Schueller
LIT 4332	26325	M W F 3	MAT 0113	Children’s Literature	Ulanowicz
LIT 4334	27062	M W F 6	MAT 0004	Golden Age of Children’s Literature	Khorasani
LIT 4930	22985	T 8-9 / R 9	TUR 2322	Passing: Black, White, Jewish	Holler
LIT 4930	23126	M 9-11 / W 9-11	TUR 2334	Questions about the Movies	Ray
LIT 4930	23166	R 6-8	ONLINE	Breaking Barriers: A Science Fiction Writing Workshop	Smith
LIT 4930	23523	M W F 8	MAT 0113	Lunar Voyages	Harpold
LIT 4930	26331	M W F 7	MAT 0115	Race and Gender in U.S. Latina/o Speculative/Gothic/Fantasy Fiction	Hedrick
LIT 4930	26574	T 7 / R 7-8	AND 0134	Hong Kong, Taiwan, Global Film	Xiao
SPC 4680	20799	T 4 / R 4-5	ROL 0115	Rhetorical Criticism: Theory	Sánchez

Course Descriptions

AML 3673

Introduction to Asian American Literature
Malini Johar Schueller

“Asian-American” is a highly contested, yet necessary, category, born of racism, nationalism, and resistance. We will examine Asian-American literary and cultural productions in relation to specific immigration acts, ideas of assimilation, race and gender stereotypes of Asians, as well as resistance to them, intergenerational conflict, nationalism and belonging. We will also study how U.S. imperialism in Asia and the Asia Pacific–the Philippines, Vietnam–have produced different Asian-American cultures. In keeping with the wide range covered by Asian American studies, the course will engage with a variety of cultural materials: novels, autobiographies, short stories, plays, poems, graphic novels, documentaries, newspaper articles, as well as essays.

Possible Texts: Jade Snow Wong, Fifth Chinese Daughter; David Henry Hwang, M Butterfly; Frank Chin, Chickencoop Chinaman; Brian Roley, American Son; R. Zamora Linmark, Leche; Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior; Aimee Phan, We Should Never Meet; and Julie Otsuka, When the Emperor Was Divine.

Requirements: Two essays, regular attendance and class participation, one oral presentation and either discussion posts or quizzes

AML 4170

Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics
Terry Harpold

An introduction to and eclectic survey of modern poetry addressing human relations with the more than human world in an age of planetary transformation. We’ll read mostly poetry by American writers of the 20th and early 21st centuries, though we’ll turn further back in time for a few important historical precursors. Individual graded course requirements include three short critical readings of poems chosen by the student from among those discussed in class, and a collaborative group project.

AML 4170

Race and Gender in Feminist Speculative/Gothic/Science Fiction
Tace Hedrick

What can reading feminist speculative and science fiction do to answer our immediate hopes and anxieties? Darko Suvin, well-known theorist of science fiction, proposed in 1972 in an essay “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre” that literary science fiction combines “the enabling of the mind to receive new wavelengths” (380) with the device of “estrangement,” which, within unfamiliar situations, allows us to recognize familiar social hopes and anxieties (374). At around the same time, feminist science fiction (or speculative fiction, since not all “science” fiction has to do with scientific or technological progress) was increasingly making narratives that estranged not just our ideas of gender, but of biology, sexuality, class, and race, letting us think about the known in new ways, or new wavelengths as Suvin had it. This course will look at feminist speculative fiction (where I include the Gothic) from around the 1970s to contemporary work. Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr., Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Anne Leckie, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Silvia Moreno-García, and others may be included. Reading quizzes, leading class discussion, attendance, and three long-essay exams are required.

AML 4170

Afrofuturism
Julia Mollenthiel

This interdisciplinary course is an examination of literary and artistic forms of Afrofuturism. Students will engage in close examination of texts by Afrofuturists from both academic and popular realms that may include fiction and non-fiction, in addition to non-print sources such as film and music. We will probe the genre of Afrofuturism and its tenets with a particular focus on representations of race and gender through time travel, aliens and space, robots, and more. We will consider the relationship between science fiction, African American history, and African diasporic literary traditions including dystopian and utopian visions of the past and future. We will also consider the various ways in which technology intersects with race and how Black artists use science fiction to challenge hegemonic systems of oppression.

AML 4242

The Harlem Renaissance and Western Europe
Mark Reid

This is a collaborative research class that critically studies the literature and culture of the Harlem Renaissance and its relationship to postwar America and Western Europe. Students will consider these central questions that emphasize creative production and its effects.

How are literature, art, and music produced and performed in different geographical regions. How did these creative works enable or hinder transnational understanding of shared cultural experiences during the postwar years? To what extent did Black artists and intellectuals redefine the racial Other in their works?

Lectures and class discussions will explore how artists, using Black vernacular and various other literary and visual strategies, dramatize social and psychological conflicts that occur when individuals and groups resist societal pressures to conform to hegemonic beliefs about race, sexuality, and gender. (To describe a hegemonic belief formation is not to say that a majority supports this belief system about race, sexuality, and gender, but to say that there appears to be no other alternative to this singular racialized sexualized gendered vision of society.)

Readings and film screenings may cover such writers as Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Richard Bruce Nugent, George Schuyler, Wallace Thurman, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Leopold Senghor, filmmakers as Oscar Micheaux, painters as Romare Bearden and Aaron Douglas, performers as Josephine Baker, Bricktop, Alberta Hunter, Paul Robeson, Bessie Smith, Valaida Snow and intellectuals as W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, E. Franklin Frazier, Marcus Garvey, and Charles S. Johnson.

Required Texts

Fauset, Jessie Redmon. Plum Bun; A Novel Without a Moral (General Books, 2010) ISBN 1152565575
Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Voices from the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford UP, 1994) ISBN 019509367
Larsen, Nella. Quicksand and Passing (Rutgers, 1986) ISBN 0813511704
Lewis, David Levering. The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (Penguin, 1995) ISBN 9780140170368
Locke, Alain LeRoy. The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Touchstone, 1999) ISBN 0684-83831-1
McKay, Claude. Home to Harlem (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1987) ISBN 1555530249
Thurman, Wallace. The Blacker the Berry (Dover Books, 2008) ISBN 0486461343
Toomer, Jean. Cane (Liveright, 1993) ISBN 0871401517

Recommended Texts

Cary D. Wintz, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance
Daylanne K. English, Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance

AML 4242

Harlem Renaissance
Julia Mollenthiel

An interdisciplinary course in the Era of the Harlem Renaissance focusing on the variety of factors that gave rise to the cultural movement and the variety of cultural expressions and artistic practices emerging out of the epicenter of Black American life. Students will analyze how Harlem’s writers experimented with diverse literary forms, how they engaged with the literary debates that shaped the movement, and how they used the arts to represent and critique the social, political, and economic conditions of the Great Migration and Jim Crow America.

AML 4282

Queer Literature Before Homosexuality
Jodi Schorb

This upper-division course familiarizes students with the long tradition of LGBTQ literatures before what scholars call “the invention of homosexuality” by the end of the nineteenth century. In contemporary discourse, the term “sexual identity” is largely synonymous with sexual “orientation,” yet terms like “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” were not coined until 1869 and 1880 respectively. What language and frameworks did earlier literary eras invoke to articulate, represent, forbid, and/or legitimate same-sex practice, love, and/or sexuality?

Drawing from Classical Greece and Rome, the Old Testament, the English Renaissance/Early Modern, Neoclassical, Romantic, and Victorian eras, as well as the early American pre-colonization, colonial, early national, and Romantic/Transcendentalist periods, the course provides students with a literary history of queerness before modern categories of sexuality and gender. While introducing students to a wide array of literature, the course gives sustained attention to American literature before 1900.

Likely readings include: Plato’s Symposium, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, oral myths and songs of the mahu, nadle, alyha, hwame, Old Testament verses and early American sermons, personal diaries and/or letters by William Bradford, Michael Wigglesworth, Anne Lister, Alexander Hamilton, Addie Brown, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman; fiction by Herman Melville, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Oscar Wilde, and “anonymous”; poetry by Sappho, Shakespeare, Aphra Behn, “Don Leon,” Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Fitz-Green Halleck, Jonathan Addington Symonds, and others; plus additional 19^th century medical case-studies and legal testimony. We will also read one contemporary novel, Justin Torres’s Blackouts, which directly engages with semester-long conversations around archival gaps and silences, processes of self-making, and the role of literature in locating a useable past.

The course is especially interested in how certain figures that we now (perhaps anachronistically) recognize as LGBTQA sought to understand and articulate themselves in their own time. Some authors look backward in order to locate literary or historical precedents for same sex love or gender variance (drawing from Greek and Roman literature, the Bible, indigenous origin stories, traditions of courtly love, etc.). Other authors plumb the possibilities of the present by drawing on shared community practices, local custom and mores, and culturally-sanctioned forms of expression or intimacy; still others, unable to recognize themselves in available discourse or horizons of possibility, articulate an emergent language of queer futurity.

AML 4311

Langston Hughes Novels, Essays, Autobiography, Plays, and Films
Mark Reid

This course employs an interdisciplinary approach that requires students to familiarize themselves with Langston Hughes’ literary and sociopolitical writings that tend to signal a burgeoning pessimism when neoliberal gestures evaporate.

Discussion topics include the Harlem Renaissance, African American literature, the blues tradition in poetry and life, and the international sociopolitical climate of our quotidian life. In discussing the literary work and political life of Langston Hughes, the course participants will critically assess how Hughes fared as an American writer and social critic and how the theoretical application of intersectionality might reveal or deny the persistence of anti-Black violence in words and deeds. How do Langston Hughes’ writings articulate sociopolitical awareness and empathy for transnational and intersectional communities.

REQUIRED TEXTS

Berry, Faith. Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem (New York: Lawrence Hill & Company, 1983). ISBN 0-88208-157-8
Berry, Faith, ed. Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Writings of Langston Hughes (Secaucus, N.J. Citadel Press, 1992). ISBN 0-8065-1308-X
Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea: An Autobiography. (New York: Putnam Berkeley Group West, 1993). ISBN 0-8090-1549-8
__________. I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey. (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993) ISBN 0-80901-5501
__________. Selected Poems of Langston Hughes. (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1990) ISBN 0-679-72818-X
__________. Five Plays by Langston Hughes. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1968) ISBN 0-253-20121-7
__________. The Ways of White Folks. (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1990) ISBN 0-679-72817-1
__________. The Panther and the Lash.: Poems of Our Times. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967
__________. Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Writings of Langston Hughes. Ed. Faith Berry. (New York: Citadel Press/Carol Publishing Group, 1992) ISBN 0-8065-1308-X (If sold out, photocopy pages from the copy that is held on RESERVE in the library)

AML 4453

Hurricanes and Literature in the American Tropics
L eah Rosenberg

Hurricanes have shaped the culture and society of the vast geographic region from Maryland to Barbados as profoundly as have political revolution, economic development, and colonial rule. The shared experience of hurricanes — their destructive power and uncertainty —have shaped and linked people across this region for over 500 years. This is historian Stewart Schwartz’s central claim in Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina.

In “Writing out the Storm” we explore a corollary claim; that the region’s literatures are likewise shaped and united by hurricanes, beginning with the 1609 account of a hurricane that inspired Shakespeare to write The Tempest. Since then, writers from the US South and the Caribbean have not merely recorded the spectacular violence and tragic outcomes of hurricanes. They have also presented these storms as engendering extraordinary acts of survival and resistance. The literature of hurricanes has warned of the climate crisis, criticized national governments and imperial interventions. And it has envisioned the future. Hurricanes have also shaped the form and technology writers employ. The challenge of everyday life without regular electricity, water, and internet has, for instance, encouraged short form writing– diary entries, letters, listicles, social media posts. In the aftermath of Irma and Maria in 2017, writers in the Virgin Islands fashioned the “hurriku,” a short poetic form they employed to depict the impact of the storms and which they shared via Facebook and radio.

In short, this course examines the long relationship between hurricanes and literature beginning with The Tempest and ending with essays and poetry about Hurricane Melissa hitting Jamaica in 2025. Along the way, we study how Olive Senior has narrated Jamaica history through hurricane poems; how Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston portrays the 1928 hurricane that lifted Lake Okeechobee from its shores; how Carl Hiassen tells the story of Hurricane Andrew (1992) and Jesmyn Ward of Katrina (2005) in very different ways. We will explore how graphic artists such as Rosaura Rodriguez depict the impact of Hurricane Maria—and how storms have shaped the aesthetics and thinking of Kamau Brathwaite, Audre Lorde, and other authors.

AML 4453

Literature and Culture of the 1920s
Susan Hegeman

This course will explore the complex moment of cultural change that is the United States in the 1920s. In this decade, for the first time, more Americans now lived in cities than on farms. Automobiles, advertising, and the new media of motion pictures and radio changed Americans’ habits, social norms, and conceptions of the good life. While some, such as the sexually liberated “flappers,” embraced new freedoms and opportunities for self-expression, the 1920s also witnessed an intense backlash against a changing country, some signs of which were alcohol prohibition, anti-immigrant fervor, and the popularity of scientific racism. Out of this ferment of change and reaction, the “Jazz Age” was a moment of remarkable artistic creativity, when American artists both looked to modernist and avant-garde practices in Europe and elsewhere and sought to define distinctively “American” arts traditions. We will discuss novels, short stories, poetry and films both as artistic expressions and documents of this tumultuous period that in many respects echoes our own.

CRW 3110

Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing
Michael Deagler

Good fiction does not happen by accident. Our favorite novels and short stories resonate because their authors took a highly considered approach to their construction. We call this approach craft, and like any set of skills, it can be acquired and sharpened through study and practice. In this course, you will learn to recognize how craft operates with an eye toward utilizing key craft concepts—character, scene, pacing, voice, etc.—in your own work. In addition to reading exemplary fiction by established authors, you will compose original pieces of fiction and workshop them in class, receiving constructive criticism from your peers that will help improve your writing.

CRW 3110

Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing
Uwem Akpan

This is a rigorous fiction writing workshop. The purpose is to make your writing better. It is important that we build a community that supports this mode of storytelling. So, come ready to learn from each other. During the semester, we are expected to submit two or three short stories or novel excerpts. We are also expected to write a critique of each submission, to help the class discuss the work in depth and to encourage the writer in the important work of rewrite. As Steven Gillis, author of Benchere in Wonderland says, “The art of writing is in the rewriting.” And since good writing or rewriting begins with good reading (or hearing of the story), we will be exposed to the works of celebrated writers and how they have dealt with key issues like craft, motivation, voice, suspense, characterization, etc.

CRW 3310

Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing
Michael Hofmann

This is the intermediate/ advanced undergraduate poetry workshop. I might call our theme here: Daytime Gothic or Mid-Century Darkness. We will read the Selected Poems of Donald Justice [1925-2004], an avatar of mine here at UF (I remember his wife putting cheese on crackers for hors d’oeuvres for me when I first arrived here) and those of the legendary Nebraskan Weldon Kees [1914-1955?], whom Justice rediscovered and presented to an ungrateful world, back in 1961). The main takeaway is – spoiler alert! –that you can’t write good poems without great lines. You will write poems to a wide array of prompts and subjects (and none).

CRW 4905

Senior Advanced Fiction Workshop
Michael Deagler

This is a workshop for serious fiction writers. Students will submit original pieces of fiction—either short stories or excerpts of novels in progress—to be read and discussed by their peers. In addition to student work, the class will read and analyze character-driven fiction by authors of note. We will strive as a group not only to help each other improve as writers, but to better understand fiction’s paradoxical power to reveal the truth by making things up.

CRW 4905

Senior Advanced Fiction Workshop
Uwem Akpan

ENC 3250

Professional Communication
Kevin Artiga

By the prevailing logic of generative AI, the English major should be cooked. Yet recent employment data point in a different direction. In a 2026 LinkedIn analysis of the most common undergraduate majors, English ranked first for versatility: 69 percent of recent English graduates found work across a diverse range of professional fields (Connley-Hampton 2026). Federal employment data likewise show English graduates working across education, management, business, media, law, and other professional fields (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2025). This versatility takes on particular significance as AI automates more routine technical tasks while placing new demands on communication, interpretation, judgment, taste, and the ability to move between different forms of information and technical production.

In other words, the practices at the center of the English major, reading and writing, are becoming progressively entangled with technical work. Professional communication increasingly brings these practices into the production, coordination, and management of technical and knowledge work. ENC 3250 thus examines professional communication as both a writing practice and a project process. Students will analyze audiences and users, conduct research, organize and visualize information, collaborate across digital workspaces, and design documents and digital artifacts. They will also scope projects, plan workflows, develop content and visual systems, and learn about agile cycles of development, testing, feedback, and revision.

These processes will be explored through both established and emerging forms of professional communication: correspondence that now moves through email, Slack, Discord, Teams, emoji, GIFs, and other networked conventions; reports that organize research and data through multimodality, data visualizations, and information graphics; instructional materials that combine writing with interaction, multimedia, and gamified elements; and user experience and interface design that shapes how people navigate and interact with digital content. The course also introduces low-code and no-code web development and examines how LLMs are extending these practices by making writing another interface for technical production. Students will use and critically evaluate emerging tools while considering the ethical, social, and practical problems that emerge as the distance between writing something and building it begins to narrow.

References

Connley-Hampton, Courtney. “The College Majors Most Likely to Get You Hired in Your Field and Outside of It.” Forbes, 25 June 2026, www.forbes.com/sites/courtney-connley-hampton/2026/06/25/the-college-majors-most-likely-to-get-you-hired/. Accessed 10 Sept. 2026.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Field of Degree: English.” Occupational Outlook Handbook, U.S. Department of Labor, 28 Aug. 2025, www.bls.gov/ooh/field-of-degree/english/english-field-of-degree.htm. Accessed 10 Sept. 2026.

ENC 3250

Professional Communication
Laura Gonzales

This online asynchronous class will introduce you to the field of technical and professional communication (TPC), emphasizing that communication is mitigated through relationships between various stakeholders and community members. Through our course projects, students will TPC in a variety of rhetorical situations, understanding how issues of access and accessibility are at play in all professional communication contexts. This is a project-based course where students will produce a digital portfolio showcasing their technical and professional communication skills. We will focus on creating technical documents, video tutorials, résumés, CVs, and digital portfolios. Each week, students will complete a reading and writing assignment on their own and get feedback on their writing. Office hours with the instructor are available weekly, and there is no synchronous class meeting time.

Note: If the registration system prevents you from registering for this course because you do not meet the prerequisites stated in the undergraduate catalog, please contact Dr. John Murchek, the English Department’s undergraduate coordinator, to request that he grant you permission to register for the course at your registration start time. Dr. Murchek can be reached at murchek@ufl.edu

ENC 3414

Hypermedia
Victor Del Hierro

This course will examine the relationship between writing, digital media, and sound. Contemporary cultures like Hip Hop have demonstrated that the link between writing, digital media, and sound can reimagine the world through engaged practice and mastery of technology, community, and expression. In this course, we will take up three main questions: How do critical understandings of writing impact the production of digital media? How does an emphasis on sound impact our understandings of writing? How does access to mass media technologies impact our responsibility to the production and consumption of texts?

Readings for the course will include both print and non-print-based texts including podcasts, videos, web-texts, and traditional articles. Subject areas will include sound studies, rhetoric, Hip Hop, internet studies, and writing. Course assignments will follow a project-based model including creating a variety of digital media including a critical playlist, a podcast, soundscapes and accompanying web-based texts.

ENC 4212

Professional Editing
Victor Del Hierro

This course will examine the theory and practice of editing and management of documentation in industry and other organizational settings. With an emphasis on Technical and Professional Communication, students will spend the semester learning best practices and strategies for doing editing work while considering culturally relevant contexts. In addition to editing, the course will also cover user-centered design and user-experience methods for approaching editing work. Readings in the course will include digital and print based texts from a variety of sources.Assignments in the course will include technical reports and project-based editing assignments including but not limited to: community organizations, website, fiction, non-fiction, and other multimodal texts.

ENC 4260

User Experience Research
Laura Gonzales

This class threads together concepts, practices, and methods from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), technical and professional communication (TPW), user-experience (UX), as well as community literacy (CL). The goal of this course is to help students understand how technology designers, professional writers, and researchers can collaborate with communities to design tools, technologies, and other media to benefit a specific community’s goals, needs, and desires. Students will read about and practice different research methods to develop their own orientation to community-based research that is grounded in contemporary technology design principles. Ultimately, students will leave this course with experience innovating, designing, testing, revising, and presenting a tool or technology of their choice, as well as an online portfolio showcasing their skills as professional communicators.

ENG 2820

What is the English Major?
Roger Maioli

What can you do as an English major, and what kinds of career paths are open to students who major in English? What are the practical and civic values of studying the discipline we call English? This course addresses questions like these by introducing the many areas of study collectively known as English and surveying the variety of academic and nonacademic careers actually pursued by English majors.

Taught by English Department faculty, the course will feature guest speakers ranging from other English professors and UF English alumni to UF librarians and on-campus undergraduate advisors. You will learn about various subfields in English, such as creative writing, film and media studies, British and American literature, African American literature, environmental fiction, and writing studies; speakers will share experiences about the job market as well as advice on career preparation; and advisors will introduce you to a variety of on-campus resources that help English majors pursue opportunities such as internships, research, and study abroad.

Besides considering the practical aspects of the major, we will also discuss the importance of English as a major subdivision of the humanities. What is English for in addition to serving as preparation for a range of careers? What role does an English education play for life in democratic societies?

This course counts towards the requirements for the English major.

ENG 3011

Literature, Criticism and Society
John Murchek

Often, when confronted with a current debate that excites passion and partisanship, one can approach the conflict productively by asking how the issues involved in the debate have been addressed in the past. Turning from immediate conflict to historical investigation dials back the acrimony that people feel about the present. Openness, curiosity, and patient inquiry replaceknee-jerk contentiousness. Consequential thinking and discussion displace the ritualized trading of militant catchphrases. So, while this course will not be about the “culture wars” or participate in them, it will take the fact of their trench warfare—which from time to time erupts into full-fledged battle—as an occasion to ask: How have writers from Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece to Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and W. E. B. DuBois in the early twentieth centurythought about the relationships between literature, politics, and social values that so agitate our current moment?

We will address such questions as: Why did Plato banish poets from his Republic? Why does Aristotle argue that a tragedy should purge the emotions of pity and fear from its audience? Why does Sir Philip Sidney argue that poetry is more valuable to the social order than philosophy or history? When Samuel Johnson writes, “Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature,” what does it mean for a representation to be “just?” How can Percy Bysshe Shelley conclude that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world?” What missions does Matthew Arnold propose for poetry and criticism in the face of nineteenth-century industrialization and Philistinism? Is it something more than mere hyperbole when Oscar Wilde declares that “all art is quite useless?” How does Alain Locke’s development of a “New Negro” aesthetic challenge W.E.B. DuBois’ emphasis on the propagandistic function of art in the 1920s? Why, when asked to speak about “Women and Fiction” to an audience of female undergraduates, does Virginia Woolf give a lecture about the relations between the material conditions of women’s lives and the fiction they can write?

As we address such questions, we will focus on the activities of reading, evaluating, and making arguments; and on the resources of prose style in English.

Students will be evaluated on the basis of attendance and participation; on 4-5 discussion posts written in response to particular prompts; on exercises in editing prose, imitating different kinds of prose style, and translating from one prose style to another; and on a major essay of 8-10 pages.

ENG 3011

The Theorists: New Sophists
Raúl Sánchez

This course introduces you to the work of scholars who, in the late 20th and early 21st century, tried to shift rhetorical theory away from the Platonic/Aristotelian paradigm that has held sway for centuries. These scholars pointed to a different source from the ancient Greek world: the sophists.

The sophists of ancient Greece taught people how to perform, think, and generally conduct themselves in public settings such as courts, forums, and ceremonies. They were contemporaries of Socrates. Few of their written works survive, so we rely on others’ descriptions—most notably and quite ironically, those of Plato. As a student of Socrates, Plato thought little of the sophists, believing that they instilled cheap or even false learning, especially when compared to what Plato himself offered.

To this day, some people—even some teachers—use the term sophistry as a pejorative. But the scholars whose work we will read and discuss question the fairness and accuracy of Plato’s perspective on sophistic thought, or they disregard it altogether. Some of them propose entirely new rhetorical theories.

We’ll start the semester by reading and discussing some of the original sophists’ texts, but mostly we will focus on texts from the 1980s to the present, when sophistic thought was revived and re-evaluated.

Writing assignments will be relatively short but unusually dense: no more than 500 words each, three or four times. In these assignments, your task will not be to master these new and unfamiliar ideas, nor will it be to make and defend claims. Instead, your task will be to “essay” (that is, to try out) new terms and concepts.

ENG 3121

History of Film 1
Barbara Mennel

History of film from its beginnings to the introduction of sound.

Grading Scheme: Letter Grade

Prerequisite: 3 credits of ENC or CRW or AML or ENG or ENL.

ENG 4015

Adventures in Psychoanalysis
Peter Rudnytsky

According to Otto Rank and Sándor Ferenczi, psychoanalysis “leads to a new interpretation of life.” This course will consist of texts that capture the lightning of psychoanalysis in their bottles and exemplify the symbiotic relations between psychoanalysis, autobiography, and literature. We will read self-analytic essays by Freud, Guntrip, and Kohut, Joan K. Peters’s Untangling: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis, Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and My Life as a Man, and Hans J. Kleinschmidt’s disguised case history of Roth. Course requirements are a midterm, final, one five-page paper., and weekly diaries. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are also expected.

ENG 4130

Colonial and Postcolonial Cinema
Pietro Bianchi

This course examines how European colonial powers – France, Britain, Italy, and Germany – used cinema to represent the occupation and colonization of other territories and to visually racialize colonized populations. From the idealization of life in the colonies for propagandistic purposes in pre-WWII cinema to the emergence of films depicting anti-colonial resistance and, finally, to contemporary cinema’s engagement with migration and the enduring legacies of colonialism, we will analyze how the colonial project has traversed the history of Western cinema in often neglected and contradictory ways. Our task will be to investigate the role of cinema in constructing – and contesting – the “political unconscious” of European colonial empires.

Films analyzed in the course will include Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko (1937), Augusto Genina’s Lo squadrone bianco (1936), Jean-Paul Paulin’s L’Esclave blanc (1936), Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), Med Hondo’s Soleil Ô (1970), Ousmane Sembène’s Xala (1975), Haile Gerima’s Adwa: An African Victory (1999) and Teza (2008), and Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019), among others.

The course is organized around the close analysis of a series of films – usually one feature-length film per week – which students will be required to watch during the dedicated screening time. The films will be contextualized and collectively discussed in class alongside excerpts from scholarly books and articles, and students will be expected to participate actively in these discussions. Assignments include weekly discussion posts on Canvas, two short quizzes, one brief in-class presentation, and an in-class final research paper.

ENG 4133

Forgery, Phantoms, Film, Painting
Richard Burt

You can forge paintings. You can counterfeit money. But can you forge a film? Do AI films count as forgeries? We will explore these questions and others by reading a number of essays, short stories, and films. Films will include When Citizen Kane met Bambi : The Lost Paintings of Tyrus Wong [CONTAINS SPOILERS]; The Grand Budapest Hotel; Pandora and the Flying Dutchman; Mr. Klein; Laura; Portrait of Jennie; Three Cases of Murder; Corridor of Mirrors; La Main du diable (The Devil’s Hand); The Picture of Dorian Gray ; Vertigo; F for Fake; The Story of a Cheat; T-Men; Lady on Fire; The Train; Nightwatching; Scarlet Street; The Woman in the Window; and Schalcken the Painter, among others. For more information, please read the course description on my website.

ENG 4133

Renaissance Literature in the Dark
Richard Burt

In this course, we will read some of the most lit plays in world literature together with film adaptations when possible. Considered in relation to what one critic has called the “Dark Renaissance” and the darkness of the movie theater, we will read Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy; Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Edward II, paired with William Shakespeare’s Richard II and The Jew of Malta paired with Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice; Ben Jonson’s Volpone paired with Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy; Jonson’s The Alchemist; John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi and the White Devil; and Middleton and William Rolwey’s The Changeling. There will be some secondary criticism. David Lowry’s film Gawain and the Green Knight (dir. 2121) will serve as a kind of prequel.

ENG 4134

Women in Film
Barbara Mennel

Studies the roles and function of women in mainstream and alternative cinema, including study of feminist film criticism and theories of gender.

Grading Scheme: Letter Grade

Prerequisite: 3 credits of ENC or CRW or AML or ENG or ENL.

ENG 4135

Israel and French Cinema
Gayle Moskowitz Zachmann

Moshé Mizrahi was the first Israeli director to win an Oscar. He did it in 1978 with a French film, Madame Rosa. It was one of three films he made in France. Six years earlier Claude Lanzmann’s 1972 documentary opus Pourquoi Israel (Israel, Why) moved from evocations of the Shoah onto a panorama of the fledgling Jewish state. The two films point to already ongoing exchange between Israeli and French cinemas, cinematic cultures, and culture makers.

This seminar-style course explores Franco-Israeli cultural relations and the evolving representations of Israel in French and francophone cinema(s). In the decades following the Holocaust and Israeli independence, along with memory of the Shoah, the cinematic figuration of Israel and its geopolitical and cultural relations with France underwent profound transformations. Organized thematically, the class historically contextualizes and analyzes French and Israeli films and co-productions. Students engage with films, targeted readings, and interviews with filmmakers, critics, archivists to understand the shifting aesthetic, social, political and commercial contexts with which the films engage.

Weekly module themes include : Israel and French Cinemas; National and Minor Cinemas; The Politics and Poetics of Loss and Memory; Visions of Israel; In the Shadow of France; Migrations and Memory; Exiles and Diasporas; Kibbutz Dreams; From the Shoah to Terror; Conflict in the 21st Century; Mossad Spies and their Others; Franco-Judaisms and Universalisms; Trials, Testimony, and the Nation(s). Class assumes no prior knowledge and may count for FFS/LLC/ENG/JST requirements, the Certificate for European Jewish Studies and the Certificate in Israel Studies. Course and readings are in English.

ENG 4136

The Art of Filmmaking
Trevor Mowchun

“Cinema may be young, but it was born when humanity was very old.” This quote from a painter testifies to cinema’s youth and maturity, a dynamic which lends it special powers of freedom and wisdom. Now this quote—“The ten best films have yet to be made”—from a filmmaker this time, serves as a reminder that cinema contains vast depths of unexplored potential, despite all the achievements by which the medium has made a great name for itself: the surface has only been scratched. The question, “What is cinema?”, posed by film theorist André Bazin and countless other philosophers of art, still echoes open-endedly: we still don’t know, one reason being that cinema keeps evolving along with our highly complex world. The artform’s current iteration is digital and an understanding of this medium is as important as a painter’s grasp of color.

While the metaphor is imperfect, aspiring filmmakers should seriously consider cinema to be a kind of language. After picking up a camera for the first time, the first thing to be aware of is that the language of film expressed with imagination and conviction requires far more than mastering its technical equipment. To learn to “speak” cinema clearly and evocatively, the student filmmaker must develop a wide array of skills, such as conceptualization, visual/poetic thinking, dramatic construction, acting, (dis)continuity, cinematography, stylistic expressivity, spatial and temporal manipulation, and sensitivity to sound. While impactful filmmaking can best be learned from studying the great films, an understanding of the artforms from which film has grown and with which it continues to intersect – i.e., photography, literature, poetry, painting, music, theater – is no less crucial. Pushing the boundaries of film often involves exploring its relationship withother artforms and their respective histories.

Students will discover the expressive potential of cinema through a combination of theoretical, methodological, and practical instruction involving lectures, in-class exercises, and workshops.Coursework will consist of both screenwriting and filmmaking in the creation of a series of short films ranging from narrative to experimental forms. The instructor will advise on the content, style, and logistics of the film work, emphasizing quality ideas, inventiveness, authenticity and feasibility. Weekly readings and film screenings are essential components of the course and their understanding will constitute a portion of the coursework as well.

Students will be given access to the English Department’s film lab, fit with ample production and post-production equipment to make films. Our lab technician will hold weekly hours to provide equipment tutorials one-on-one, manage the borrowing and timely return of equipment, and resolve any technical issues that arise. Students are permitted to borrow equipment and use the editing suites upon completion of tutorials administered by the technician.

*Interested students must request an application for the course from the professor, Dr. Trevor Mowchun (tmowchun@ufl.edu). Complete applications are due via email by October 23.

ENG 4910

Collaborative Research: Cultural Rhetorics
Dinalo Chakma

Cultural rhetorics is the study of how communities create culturally specific meaning-making and communicative practices. It also centers on argument, persuasion, objects, and meaning and how power and marginalization shape the effect of these. Cultural rhetorics works to articulate the ongoing recognition of social and cultural practices and biases that simultaneously include and exclude, amplify and disguise people and their communicative opportunities. We will study the rhetorical practices of underrepresented groups of people and examine the intersections between bodies, texts, contexts, and histories. While doing that, we will put a specific focus on the rhetorical challenges of communicating between the Global North and the Global South that informs our contemporary world. This class will focus on experiential learning, where we will practice maker methods via “digital” composing, constellate our stories, and become autoethnographers. Students will conduct primary research throughout the semester, utilizing various CR methods, such as storytelling, interviews, participant observations, and relational ties.

ENG 4911

Undergraduate Research
TBD

An undergraduate research registration is appropriate in two different situations.

On the one hand, you can register for undergraduate research as a free-standing project, in which a member of the English Department faculty agrees to oversee your research on a topic of interest to you and related to the faculty member’s areas of expertise. A student will approach a faculty member with a research topic or question they want to explore, and, in conversation with the faculty member, refine that topic or question, develop a research plan and schedule, and determine the kind of work that will be submitted in the course of the semester. This kind of project differs from independent study primarily by being less predetermined than an individualized course. It will be more open-ended because pursuing research can always lead you to materials you don’t anticipate at the beginning of the project.

On the other hand, faculty members now regularly require that students who want to write scholarly, critical, or theoretical honors theses under their direction register for the undergraduate research course in the semester prior to the one in which they will be registered for the honors thesis course. An undergraduate research registration is appropriate in this situation because it allows students attempting to graduate magna or summa cum laude to do the preliminary reading, research and drafting of materials necessary to complete an honors thesis of 30-50 pages in the semester for which they are registered for the honors thesis course. Because most UF English majors will not have had the experience of writing a 30-50 page essay in their previous English Department coursework, they will need to confront novel research, argumentative, organizational, and rhetorical problems when they write honors theses. When one acknowledges the facts that most students take a week or two at the beginning of a semester to settle into their schedules, and that the readers of honors theses will want to see completed drafts of these projects no later than week 11 or 12 of the thesis-writing semester, it becomes clear that there is relatively little time in that semester to do all the work necessary to complete an honors thesis The undergraduate research registration gives students time to develop their honors theses patiently, methodically, and deliberately, rather than in a desperate rush.

As with the independent study course, most English Department faculty do not agree to direct undergraduate research projects unless they know the students requesting the guidance from previous coursework for the major.

You will need to complete and submit an Undergraduate Special Registration Request Form (available at https://forms.english.ufl.edu/forms-links/). Follow these instructions:

Complete the first page of the form. Provide the personal information the department needs to register you, select the number of credits for which you want to be registered (keeping in mind that the course will only count as one of the 10 courses for the major if you register for 3 credits), and sign and date the form at the bottom of the page.
On the second page of the form, and in consultation with the faculty member directing your undergraduate research project, provide a description of the work you will be doing during your undergraduate research registration. The description should include the topic or question the research will address, the materials you will be researching to explore this topic or question (a preliminary bibliography might be helpful here), the work you will submit to receive a grade for the course, and an account of how that work will be assessed.
Ask the faculty member directing the undergraduate research to print their name, and sign and date the form at the bottom of the second page.
Send the form to Dr. John Murchek at murchek@ufl.edu. If everything is in order, he will sign and date the form, set up a section of ENG 4911 for the faculty member directing your undergraduate research, and register you for it.

Grading for ENG 4911:
At the end of the semester, the faculty member directing the undergraduate research for which you are registered will submit a grade for you in the UF grading system.

ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: Lost Ladies: Turn of the 20th Century Women Writers
Stephanie Smith

When, in 1923, American novelist Willa Cather published her novel A Lost Lady, the idea that ladyhood was being lost had been in circulation for some time. The figure emerged in the midst of tension between social, economic and technological changes that would alter the tenor of daily life in America and older ideas about what it meant to uphold standards of female propriety, ideas about ‘ladyhood’ that stubbornly persisted in spite of the opening of new horizons for women. For example, the domestic labor force swelled with immigrants, many of them young women from Eastern Europe and Ireland, seeking a better life. The Great Migration out of the South into the North of African Americans began around 1912. And, while some American women had been working in the public domain for decades, house-bound middle-class women also began to seek work and even entertainment outside of the home. The movie industry was in its early stages, and soon the nearly breastless flapper would take the place of the corseted hourglass figure. New modes of production, improved technologies like the steam-powered sewing machines of the 1870s, marketing, advertising and distribution made for the increased production and consumption of mass-marketed goods from hats to handbags.

The twentieth century offered change to many American women, from what they did to what they wore, and, of course, who they were. A new word entered the American vocabulary at this time, originating in Bohemian Greenwich Village: “feminist.” Although women would not have the vote until 1921, suffragettes regained some of the political steam lost by the earlier Women’s Movement. People of this era, especially young women, were restless. Many works written by women at this time reflect upon feelings that women had about themselves that ranged from dissatisfaction to hopelessness. For example, in 1913, both Thea Kronberg of Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark and Undine Spragg of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, are described as physically restless, as if a compulsion to move had been inscribed in their flesh. These young women sought to slough off the prim and proper corset of ladyhood to become the New Woman of the 20^th century.

Women authors began to explore hitherto taboo choices or silenced miseries, and this period marked a flowering of women’s voices that had been, in the past, left out by most critical paradigms of American literature, such as realism and naturalism. This Honors Seminar course will explore that flowering of the American woman’s narrative from 1898 to 1929; authors will include Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Nella Larson, among others, along with critical arguments about the works we shall read.

ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: Affect Theory and Its Discontents
Thomas Conners

Affect theory is an interdisciplinary field interested in physical feelings, visceral intensities, and the way we make sense of them. While some scholars approach this scientifically, others have studied the sociocultural dimensions of affect, considering how feelings (both good and bad) motivate interaction and influence expression. This class explores affect theory’s recent turn to negative, ugly, and backward feelings to question affective norms and (re)potentiate some of our most frequent experiences and unpleasant feelings. Beginning by questioning happiness and moving through its contraries, this class introduces students to theories and thinkers on the forefront of feminist, queer, and cultural critique. Together, we interrogate contemporary imperatives to be happy while discussing the political, antiracist, anti-patriarchal potency of killjoys and complaints. We engage “ugly feelings” as indexes of capitalism’s unjust inequalities. We ponder the aesthetic and political possibilities of loneliness, feeling backwards, and being lazy. While we primarily study critical theory’s “negative turn,” we also consider how feelings (broadly) and emotions like rage, disgust, and ennui (more specifically) appear in literary and audiovisual texts.

ENG 4940

English Internship
Roger Maioli

The internship course allows English majors to earn credit towards fulfillment of the 10-course requirement for the major by gaining work experience in an area related to the skills they are acquiring as English majors and to the career goals they aim to pursue once they have graduated from the University of Florida. Because the transferable skills students acquire as English majors are both diverse (depending on the areas in which they have concentrated their coursework) and valuable in a variety of different kinds of workplace settings, the English Department is quite liberal in its interpretation of what kinds of work experiences will be appropriate for students wanting to earn internship credit. Internships allow students to get a sense of the demands and rewards of particular kinds of careers, and, if the internships go well, can provide students with possible letters of recommendation written by their supervisors that could prove valuable when they are applying for work before and after graduating from UF. The English Department encourages students to take advantage of this opportunity.

ENG 4970

Honors Thesis
TBD

Honors theses give students the opportunity to work independently on original scholarly, critical, or creative projects under the direction of faculty members who work in the relevant fields. Students’ honors theses can be the culmination of their undergraduate experiences, and even anticipate the interests they will pursue in graduate studies.

In the English Department, honors theses may take a variety of forms. Most often, students write essays of 30–50 pages in length dealing with topics in literary criticism, history, or theory; film and media studies; or, cultural studies. Such essays are appropriate for students who hope to go on to graduate or professional degree programs. However, students who have pursued creative-writing coursework for the major may write short stories, poetry, or even a novella to fulfill the thesis requirement, and students who have concentrated in film and media studies can produce a short film or video (often accompanied by a brief essay providing a rationale for the project).

Students who register for honors thesis projects must have a 3.5 upper-division GPA, and have earned a grade of “B” or better in at least one English Department Honors Seminar (ENG 4936). Students work with two readers (known as the first and second readers), whom they choose from among the members of the English Department faculty. These two readers may co-direct the thesis, or the first reader may direct the work, with the second reader offering suggestions for revision and improvement only when the project is fairly well-advanced. Faculty members generally agree to serve as readers for honors thesis projects only when they know students from prior coursework for the major.

If a student who has a 3.5 upper-division GPA, and has finished one honors seminar with a minimum grade of B, submits an honors thesis that earns a minimum grade of B+, that student can graduate magna cum laude (with high honors). If a student who has a 3.5 upper-division GPA, and has completed two honors seminars, earning a grade of A in one and no less than a B in the other, submits an honors thesis that earns a grade of A, that student can graduate summa cum laude (with highest honors).

You will need to complete and submit an Undergraduate Special Registration Request Form (available at https://forms.english.ufl.edu/forms-links/). Follow these instructions:

Complete the first page of the form. Provide the personal information the department needs to register you, and sign and date the form at the bottom of the page.
On the second page of the form, and in consultation with the first and second faculty readers of your honors thesis project, provide a description of the argument you anticipate making in the thesis.
Ask the first and second readers of the honors thesis to print their name, and sign and date the form at the bottom of the second page.
Send the form to Dr. John Murchek at murchek@ufl.edu. If everything is in order, he will sign and date the form, set up a section of ENG 4970 for the first reader of your honors thesis, and register you for it.

Submission of honors thesis and grading for ENG 4970:

In the semester in which you graduate, Dr. Murchek will inform you of the deadline by which you need to submit the honors thesis to the UF Institutional Repository.

Your readers will determine a deadline by which you need to submit a final draft of your honors thesis to them so that they can turn in a final grade to Dr. Murchek by the Monday of the last week of classes. They submit this grade to Dr. Murchek so that he can make a final honors recommendation for you to the graduation coordinator in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences by the last day of classes. Your first reader will also submit your grade for the honors thesis course in the UF grading system by the grades submission deadline for the semester.

You need to submit a copy of the final, approved version of the honors thesis to the English Department by the Monday of the last week of classes. This document can be submitted to Dr. Murchek at murchek@ufl.edu as an email attachment.

ENL 3122

Growing Up Victorian
Sean Grass

In his essay “Where We Stopped Growing,” published in Household Words in 1853, Charles Dickens wrote “Childhood is usually so beautiful and engaging, that … there is a mournful shadow of the common lot, in the notion of its changing and fading into anything else.” Early in the century, children—at least, the children of the poor—labored in factories and mines, died routinely of injuries and disease, and were treated as small adults. By the end of the century, childhood was generally regarded as a special, protected period of human life meant to be filled with tender nurturing, imagination, and wonder. This semester we will read several major Victorian novels that take up the subject, explicitly or implicitly, of what it was like to “grow up Victorian” at various times in the century. Novels will include Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, The Mill on the Floss, Great Expectations, and The Way of All Flesh. We will likely do, too, some modest reading in nineteenth-century theories about children and child-rearing.

ENL 4221

Milton’s Paradise Lost
Peter Rudnytsky

This course will be devoted to a close reading of what Stephen Greenblatt has called “the greatest poem in the English language.” Theological, political, psychological, and gender issues will be considered as we focus on understanding the language and autobiographical dimensions of Milton’s seventeenth-century epic about “man’s first disobedience.” Course requirements are a midterm, a final, and one five-page paper. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are also expected

LIT 3374

The Hebrew Bible as Literature
Robert Kawashima

This course will introduce students to the literary study of the Hebrew Bible within its ancient Near Eastern context. It contains some of the great literary works to come down to us from antiquity, on par with the Homeric epics. And biblical narrative constitutes the oldest prose literature that we know of at present. Our primary focus will be on a wide and varied reading of biblical narrative — along with a bit of poetry — but students will also be introduced to the scholarly study of the Bible from a literary perspective. More generally, this course will introduce students to the scholarly, interdisciplinary study of literature. That is, if the solutions and interpretations proposed will be specific to the Bible, the problems and ideas raised will have relevance for the study of literature in general.

LIT 3400

Black Femininity and Being: Analyzing Black Femininity from Page to Picture
Catherine Saunders

Whether a literary subject or the lead role on a prime-time series, the Black woman proves ever- evolving in image and impact. This course invites students to examine Black femininity in literature and film to examine how patterns correspond to larger themes of ontology, sexuality, and freedom. Students will engage the Black female subjects that ornament the literary worlds of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, and Bernadine Evaristo, the cinematic worlds of Amma Asante and Ava Duvernay, the small screen worlds of Shonda Rhimes and Tracey Oliver, and the musical worlds of global superstars like Beyonce to contemplate Black femininity as a global enterprise for cultural enlightenment.

LIT 3400

Poetics of Justice: Law, Literature, and Film
Eric Kligerman

In his brief yet complex parable “Before the Law,” Kafka describes how a man from the
country searches for the law but is stopped outside the gates by a menacing guard, never to
gain entrance to the law. What is the significance of this failure to grasp the law? How does
Kafka’s perplexing tale shed light on questions pertaining to the interplay between justice,
law and violence, and how do we as individuals encounter these conflicts within the social
and political spaces in which we live?

This interdisciplinary course sets out to explore these very questions and collisions by
juxtaposing shifting modes of representations. By turning to the works of history (Thucydides), religion (Book of Job), philosophy (Plato, Nietzsche and Arendt), literature (Sophocles, Dostoyevsky and Kafka) and film (Tarantino and the Coen brothers), our objective is to trace the narrative of justice through ancient Greece, the Enlightenment, the modern and postmodern periods. In particular, we will examine the realm of trials (both real and imaginary) to probe the relation between justice and ethics along with the various questions pertaining to law, guilt, responsibility, violence and punishment. How do writers critique the institutions of law and justice through works of literature and art? Our goal is to rethink these dynamic relationships by turning to the spaces of history, philosophy, political thought, literature and film.

LIT 4188

Nation and Narration, or Nationalism and the Novel
Apollo Amoko

This course explores the relationship imagined between “nation” and “narration.” In Imagined Communities, a landmark study on the origins and spread of nationalism, Benedict Anderson appears to suggest that the novel (along with the newspaper) was central to the possibility of imagining the modern nation. The aesthetic of the novel made it possible to think and narrate the nation in “homogeneous empty time.” Further, Anderson seems to contend that the canonization of literary texts through the school system was instrumental for enabling the intelligentsia to “take the nation to the people.” From this perspective, it is not surprising that literature has historically conceived of its objects of study in fundamentally nationalist terms. In Cultural Capital, a landmark study on the logic of literary canon formation, John Guillory contends that the effect of nationalist legitimation cannot be understood as a property inherent in the aesthetic of the novel (or the newspaper), but rather, is the product of a certain context of reading, “a pedagogical imaginary.” Specific literary works, Guillory insists, must be seen as “the vector of ideological notions which do not inhere in the works themselves but in the context of their institutional presentation, or more simply, in the way in which they are taught.” He makes a firm distinction between pedagogical and national imaginaries, between school and national cultures. In his argument, school culture “does not unify the nation culturally so much as it projects out of a curriculum of artifact-based knowledge an imaginary cultural unity never actually coincident with the culture of the nation-state.” While for Anderson, the novel enables the emergence of national culture, for Guillory, the cultural institutions of the novel reflect a highly restrictive school culture. Which of these two theorists presents the more persuasive argument regarding the connection between nation and narration? We will attempt to answer this question by looking at a range of canonical texts from a variety of national and continental contexts.

LIT 4188

Literary and / as Science Fiction
Phillip Wegner

In this course we will explore the increasingly prominent place of science fiction within global English language literature published in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. For many years, there was an implicit divide between what was understood by some critics (and readers) to be “serious” literature and genre fiction, including science fiction. However, a growing number of the most prominent writers of the last few decades have drawn more and more upon the figures, tropes, and devices of science fiction; and some have even produced works that would be identified by most readers as science fiction. At the same time, established writers previously enjoyed only by fans of science fiction have garnered wider and more diverse audiences as their work begins to move into new territories. The result has been a tremendous revitalization of contemporary world English language literature, as it has been able to respond in ever more productive ways to the rapidly changing realities of our increasingly planetary lives.

Readings will include a number of the following: Ted Chiang, “Story of Your Life” (1998); David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004); Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006); Kazuo Ishiguro,Never Let Me Go (2006); Colson Whitehead, Zone One (2011); Emmi Itäranta, The Memory of Water (2014); Mohsin Hamid, Exit West (2017); John Lanchester, The Wall (2019); Paul Lynch, Prophet Song (2023); Samantha Harvey, Orbital (2024); Ian McEwan, What We Can Know(2025). We will also touch on film adaptations of some of these works.

LIT 4194

The Drama of Africa
Apollo Amoko

This course will critique a diverse catalogue of contemporary African plays. Novels have long come to dominated African literary studies. In what ways would placing drama center stage alter the critical and theoretical terrian? In a sense, the high profile enjoyed by the novels merely reflects the overall (but perhaps temporary) decline of poetry and drama in contemporary literary studies. However, this development enacts specific distortions in an embattled postcolonial context where the canonical novel continues to implicate a small intellectual class, what Kwame Anthony Appiah has contemptuously termed the “comprador intelligentsia.” According to Appiah, high cultural African art inhabits and reflects the world of “a relatively small, Western style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers, who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery.” The preoccupations of that rarified class would seem to be fundamentally at odds with the practices and politics of everyday life in the bewilderingly diverse continent. To what extent does drama escape the limits of elite culture? Simon Gikandi suggests that plays can perform an important mediating function in contemporary African culture: “Conceived as an instrument for change, drama, more than the novel, could be formalized to overcome the historical and social gap between intellectuals and workers, between popular culture and elite forms of artistic expression.” The course critique Gikandi’s provocative contentions against the backdrop of Appiah’s sweeping claims. We will focus on such landmarks in the history of African theater as the First and Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (Festac) that were in Algiers, Algeria in 1969 and Lagos, Nigeria in 1977). As well, we will examine the various national theater movements established in postcolonial Africa with particular emphasis on the Kenya National Theatre controversy of the 1970s, the Kamiriithu Theatre Experiment, the Popular Theater Movement, the Theatre for Development Movement.

LIT 4233

Postcolonial Theory
Malini Johar Schueller

This course introduces you to the field of postcolonial theory. By the beginning of the twentieth century, a few European powers had colonized 80% of Asia and Africa. Nationalist movements during the latter half of the century led to territorial, but not necessarily economic, cultural and intellectual decolonization. The continuing cultural, political, and economic effects of colonialism, as well as new forms of colonialism and imperialism sanctioned on the global South constitute the field of postcolonial studies. We will study the ways in which postcolonial theory has intersected with and impacted diverse areas of inquiry such as feminism, historiography, ethnography, politics, and literature. At the same time, this course will stress the importance of historicizing postcoloniality. The course will focus on the central concerns of postcolonial studies: the nature of colonial discourse, the articulation of revolutionary national consciousness, questions of subalternity and history, the relationship of postcolonial studies to gender studies, and the politics of contemporary colonialism and neocolonialism. We will read the works of major revolutionaries and theorists and the debates and arguments about these works. The course will cover writings from and about the major parts of the world affected by imperialism: Europe, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Middle East, and the U.S.. We will see how postcolonial theory can be useful in analyzing conditions of oppression today.

This is an intensive discussion course. Please come to class prepared to raise questions about the readings for the day. I am interested in your active responses to the materials you are reading.

Required Texts:

Ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory
Woman at Point Zero (possibly or another short novel)
Readings on canvas.

Requirements: class participation, regular attendance; two essay exams; quizzes or discussion posts; one oral presentation

LIT 4332

Children’s Literature
Anastasia Ulanowicz

This course will provide an introduction to major works of American children’s literature written from 1868 to 2000. As we examine these texts, we will consider how and why (or even whether) they might be read specifically as children’s books – and how, moreover, their study might prompt us to evaluate the American literary canon in its various historical permutations. Additionally, we will question the ways in which these texts represent race, class, gender, and nation.

LIT 4334

Golden Age of Children’s Literature
Maryam Khorasani

The first “Golden Age” of children’s literature (approximately 1860-1920) marked a transformative period in the publishing world, characterized by the emergence of classic works that shaped children’s fiction. This era witnessed an increasing recognition of children as distinct readers with unique needs and interests, leading to the creation of imaginative, didactic, and sometimes cautionary tales that often addressed their physical, emotional, and psychological well-being. In this course, we will explore the first Golden Age of children’s literature through the theme of health, exploring how physical well-being, mental health, disability, and emotional development were portrayed in classic works of the period. We will examine how these stories engage with Victorian and Edwardian ideas about the body, illness, and the mind—ranging from medical anxieties to natural healing—and how these texts reflect broader societal attitudes toward childhood and health. We will also challenge and expand the boundaries of this literary canon to explore how we might reimagine a “Golden Age” of children’s literature that confronts the limitations and problematic aspects of the traditionally conceived “Golden Age of Children’s Literature.”

LIT 4930

Passing: Black, White, Jewish
Roy Holler

Aren’t we all passing? We change how we present ourselves depending on where we are, who we’re with, and what we want. We hide parts of ourselves, take on new identities, and sometimes try to be seen as someone we are not. But what happens when passing is about changing one’s race, ethnicity, gender, or religion? When does passing help us move through the world, and when does it go too far?

Following passing across literature, film, television, and legal cases, we begin the course with African Americans who passed as white at the turn of the twentieth century, when being discovered could have devastating consequences. From there, we turn to Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing, which coined the term, and see how the act developed and changed in contemporary culture, including a reality show that asks two families to experience life as another race. The second half of the course looks at passing as a global strategy used by minorities and communities across borders, with a focus on transnational Jewish identity. We consider Barbra Streisand playing a girl who passes as a boy to study Torah in Yentl, Dahn Ben-Amotz, a Holocaust survivor who erases his past, and end with Palestinian family claiming belonging in Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa.

Students will keep a reading journal, write a term paper, and create a class podcast that brings the course’s questions about passing into the world beyond the classroom.

LIT 4930

Questions about the Movies
Robert Ray

A French critic once expressed the difficulty of writing about the cinema by observing that because film is so easy to understand, it’s hard to explain. In fact, the movies are more mysterious than we typically realize, raising all sorts of questions. How would we teach a child to distinguish fiction from documentary? Can we define what counts as acting? Does it matter what an actor is thinking about while he or she is performing a scene? What are the signs that someone is pretending? If I’m observing people who seem to be playing a game, how can I tell if they are obeying the game’s rules? For what uses would pre-digital-era photography prove more effective than painting?

In this course, we’ll use certain philosophers (Plato, Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, and Cavell) to examine questions the movies make us think about. The 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 10-year-olds.

Movies will include People on Sunday, Close-Up, 1001 Grams, Anatomy of a Murder, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, Blow-Up, The Lady Eve, Vertigo, The Rules of the Game, and It Happened One Night.

Assignments: If the class is small, bi-weekly two-page papers written to your choice of a prompt from several distributed the week before. If the class is large, two three-hour in-class exams will replace the papers. In either case, participation in class discussion will count for 40% of the final grade. Written work must earn at least a 90 for a final course grade of A- or better.

LIT 4930

Breaking Barriers: A Science Fiction Writing Workshop
Stephanie Smith

From that inaugural work of body-modification, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, fictions that engage deeply with science have often sought to extend, explore, confuse or break the confines of the human body and/or soul, in order to understand more fully what it means to be human. Whether contemplating technological interventions, such as the inventions we still call robots, androids or cyborgs, or genetic ones, in which human genomes are scrambled, infected or recoded, or psychological ones, in which human perception plays a significant role, SF has repeatedly sought to challenge the limits of both known science and accepted norms regarding human embodiment. In this writing workshop we shall revisit some older fictions that take on the task of re-imagining the human body, while we perform some fictional thought-experiments of our own. We will workshop those experiments, read and critique our own works, and strive to create fictions about our future(s).

LIT 4930

Lunar Voyages
Terry Harpold

An eclectic survey of the sizeable literary canon of extraordinary voyages to and from our planet’s nearest neighbor in space, and what – or who – we may discover there.

After a brief review of the planetary science and cultural meaning of the Moon – how it is, as Rebecca Boyle observes, the Moon “made us who we are” – we’ll start with the earliest translunar literary narratives, Lucian’s Vera Historia (True History, 2nd c. CE) and The Tale of Princess Kaguya (10th c. CE). Then we’ll leap ahead to the 17th century for Johannes Kepler’s astronomy-lesson-as-fiction Somnium (The Dream, 1634) and Francis Godwin’s and Cyrano de Bergerac’s utopian fantasies The Man in the Moone(Godwin, 1638) and The Other World: Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (Cyrano, 1657). We’ll take part in two brief adventures with a copy of Rudolf Erich Raspe’s Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of His Marvellous Travels (1785) in our pockets, before the 19th century presents us with archetypal journeys that shaped all that follows: Edgar Allan Poe (“The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaal,” 1835), Jules Verne (From the Earth to the Moon, 1865; Around the Moon, 1870), H.G. Wells (First Men in the Moon, 1901), and a few marginal but striking oddities, such as Pierre de Sélènes’s An Unknown World: Two Years on the Moon (1896). Then we’re headlong into the early twentieth century via the modern age of rocketry (Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Robert Goddard’s visions of the mechanics of the voyage are determinate here) and the naïve enthusiasm of the pulp, golden, and silver ages of science fiction. We’ll read several short works in the launching and landing and leaving strains of the genre from the first half of the century, less comedic and self-reflective than their predecessors.

As July 20, 1969, approaches, the lunar voyage narrative begins to turn from the technological novelties of the journey and the funhouse mirrors of triumphantly orbiting and treading on a lifeless rock, to the deflationary psychic economy of we’ve-arrived-now-what? and the melancholy emptiness of occupation. Elements of political satire and ridicule of scientific hubris – almost universal in this genre, and we’ll address why that might be – grow more direct and critical (Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint,1959, for example). An imaginative exhaustion begins to set in, even as Armstrong takes his first small step; the Apollo program is ended in 1972, and actual lunar voyage stories cease for at least another half-century. Thomas M. Disch’s “Moondust, the Smell of Hay, and Dialectical Materialism” (1967), Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” (1970), and J.G. Ballard’s “The Man Who Walked on the Moon” (1985) and “Neil Armstrong Remembers His Journey to the Moon” (1991) capture the declining mood of the century’s close. (Perversely, this period and the next few decades represent a true golden age of lunar science, and international publicly– and privately-funded, unmanned missions. But the urge to leave another footprint on the surface and reflect on what that could mean also quieted considerably. It remains to be seen if the current race between China and the United States to “return” humans to the Moon before this decade is out is motivated by anything more than nationalist pride and extractive appetite.)

We’ll pass briefly through fictional struggles of colonization and liberation – Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Lunatics” (1988) and Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita’s Lunar Braceros 2125–2148 (2026) – and conclude the course with Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility (2022), asking why it is that one of the most elegant and humane tales of lunar residence of the twenty-first century (thus far) should depend so heavily on literary gymnastics of time travel and meta-fiction.

Writing requirements include three short critical papers on assigned readings for the course.

LIT 4930

Race and Gender in U.S. Latina/o Speculative/Gothic/Fantasy Fiction
Tace Hedrick

How can reading United States Latina/o/x speculative and science fiction expand our understanding of the questions speculative and science fiction present, and sometimes try to answer, for us? United States Latina/o/x literature until recently lacked a well-known body of fantasy and science fiction. Imagined as having bodies and cultures constantly unmodern in nature, United States Latinx worlds seemed not to accord with dominant assumptions of a contemporary or future world, scientifically imagined or not, that purports to look “forward.” With the explosion of many different varieties of speculative fiction from the 1990s forward, Latin/a/o/x authors in the United States place bodies of color across the United States Latina/o/x spectrum front and center in speculative ways that often resist the oppression, invisibility, (hetero)sexism, classism, and racism that they have faced in the past. These are not imperialist tales of white men conquering our spaces or other worlds; these narratives are told from the other side of race, sexuality, class, and conquest. We will be reading a series of novels from the dystopian to the fantastic to the weird to the explosive. Attendance, leading class discussion, reading quizzes, and 3 take-home long essay exams constitute your grades.

LIT 4930

Hong Kong, Taiwan, Global Film
Ying Xiao

The course explores the rise and various aspects of Hong Kong cinema and Taiwanese cinema through the lens of globalization. One of the world’s largest and energetic film industries, Hong Kong cinema has a global presence and impact that enthralls a broad global audience not only as an epitome of popular entertainment but also through its creativity, craftmanship, diversity, and multifaceted interactions and linkages with other cinemas and international culture. Another example we juxtapose and examine in class is Taiwan new cinema, one of the most imaginative and stylistic films that demonstrates a distinct art and registers the discourses of postcolonialism, modernity, nationalism, and globalization in similar and different ways. How do they draw upon local traditions and identities and on the other hand, significantly connect to global market and Hollywood? How have they contributed to global cinema and the development of film as a medium?

This course takes students on a comparative and interdisciplinary exploration of Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinemas to look at their histories, main themes, diverse genres, industrial practice, aesthetic styles, diasporic cultures, and the transregional/transnational cultural exchange and collaborations. Filmmakers and stars to be discussed include Tsui Hark, John Woo, Wong Kar-wai, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Maggie Cheung, Stephen Chow, Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang, and Ang Lee. Screenings cover a wide variety of genres from martial arts, melodrama, comedy, romantic film, to ghost story and musical.

SPC 4680

Rhetorical Criticism: Theory
Raúl Sánchez

This course introduces you to the field of rhetorical studies, which is comprised of rhetorical criticism and rhetorical theory. In rhetorical criticism, you apply analytical instruments to texts and practices. In rhetorical theory, you create these instruments. This is an oversimplification that we will complicate throughout the semester.

Reading assignments and class discussions will lean toward rhetorical theory, mainly because rhetorical theory has been very active in the last 75 years or so. This activity has usefully disrupted the field’s ability to carry out rhetorical criticism.

Reading assignments will be relatively short but unusually dense: few pages, many ideas. We will spend class time pouring carefully over key passages. It might “feel” more like a philosophy course than an English course.

Writing assignments will also be relatively short but unusually dense: no more than 500 words each, three or four times. In these assignments, your task will not be to master these new and unfamiliar ideas, nor will it be to make and defend claims. Instead, your task will be to “essay” (that is, to try out) new terms and concepts, to see where they lead you.