Graduate Seminars 2026-27

Fall 2026

ENGL 5004F: Studies in Transnational Literatures
Topic: Black Europe
Prof. Sarah Casteel

This seminar explores “Black Europe” as a historical phenomenon, a theoretical framework, and a set of artistic practices. We will engage with a series of creative and critical texts that foreground Europe’s historical and contemporary entanglements with Africa and its diasporas. Together, we will read, look at, and listen to works by Black European intellectuals, activists, writers, artists, performers, and musicians. Challenging an understanding of Europe as a bounded, racially homogenous space, these works reframe European history and culture through Black perspectives.

The interdisciplinary, or “undisciplined,” design of this course is critical to its excavation of Black European cultural histories that have been occluded by more conventional frameworks. Reading across different media will help to expose the “bundles of silences” (Trouillot) surrounding the contributions of Black artists—especially Black women artists—to European literature, art, and music.

ENGL 5610F: Studies in Contemporary Literature I
Topic:  Digital Dystopia
Prof. Brian Greenspan

A survey of utopian and dystopian thinking around media and technology.

The enormous popularity of dystopian narratives in recent years is hardly surprising, given the daily barrage of stories about war, climate change, pandemics, mass surveillance, and AI. What is surprising is that even the most disturbing stories of real or imaginary technological apocalypse continue to inspire utopian hope, and to shape our identities in ways that are progressive and collective. Does literature still offer a viable enclave within the broader networks of new media? How can fiction help us to imagine a better world in a “post-truth” era that coopts the strategies of fictionality itself?

This seminar will explore the role of new media and technologies in contemporary fiction. We will read utopian and dystopian narratives alongside studies of science fiction, technology, and intentional communities. We will also explore new digital tools for analyzing texts, visualizing data, authoring stories, and/or building simulations in order to better evaluate the hopeful or apocalyptic discourses surrounding new media.

ENGL 5804F: Studies in Canadian Literature I
Rereading ‘Women’s Liberation’ (cross-listed with CDNS5201 and WGST5902)
Prof. Jennifer Henderson

This course undertakes a critical examination of the ‘Women’s Liberation’ movement of the 1970s. We look at archival materials and media representations from the period, as well as recent scholarship on the complex legacies of the movement and ambivalent relations to it. Our readings include movement writing and periodicals, autobiography, art installation, film, manifesto and ephemera as we work with several Canadian archives. Our interests are in the movement’s rhetorics, figures, and emotions; its practices of consciousness raising, formation of collectives and direct action; its wild imagination and something like its ‘atmosphere.’ We pay attention to the uncertain and contested meanings of ‘woman’ and ‘women’; the construction of ‘lesbian feminist’ as a social identity; the attempt to produce an analysis of gendered labour under capitalism through the concept of social reproduction. Throughout, we’ll be thinking about the movement’s staging both within and against colonialism, racism, heteronormativity, and binary gender. The course aims to be an inclusive, 2SLGBTQ-positive space and is for anyone interested in learning how to think about identities and politics historically. Women’s Liberation took shape in a world very different to ours–before the structural and ideological changes of neoliberalism in the later decades of the 20^th century, which is part of what we’ll work to understand as we look at a movement in its moment of messy eruption and relate to its memory as a complex inheritance.

ENGL 5900F: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with ENGL4607 & WGST 4812/5901)
Topic: Queer/ Feminist/ Life/ Writing
Prof. Jodie Medd

This course takes queer/feminist/life/writing as a suggestive constellation for exploring a range of hybrid text that include elements of biofiction/biostory, autobiography, memoir, creative nonfiction, the personal essay, critical fabulation, autotheory, and more. We will study twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts—many by writers working across literary and academic forms—to consider how authors have engaged with, innovated, and disrupted forms and genres for narrating feminist and queer lives; how they have blended personal writing with political, theoretical, philosophical and academic discourse; how their texts mattered to the moment of their composition; and how and why they matter now. The writers on our course are attuned to how individual, embodied experience is formed—and de-formed—by structures of power and narrative modes. Their work engages these connections through formal innovations to make us perceive, think, and read differently. Students will have leeway to research, write, and present on areas of interest to them, from literary form and style to theoretical frameworks and socio-cultural-political issues. Students will have the option to develop a final creative/critical project of personal interest to them, inspired by the hybrid life/writing from the course.

Content may include (but is not limited to) childhood; parenthood; loss and grief; Black life and the afterlife of slavery; racial capitalism; trans narratives; queer Indigeneity and the Canadian colonial project; illness narratives; disability justice; subjectivity, representation and the writing “I;” community and care; lifewriting and the archives; the literary institution and the work of empire; intimate partner abuse; trauma and recovery; art, academia and activism . . . and more.

Expect authors/creators on the course to include: Billy-Ray Belcourt, Dionne Brand, Saidiya Hartman, Audre Lorde, Carmen Maria Machado, Maggie Nelson, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Paul B Preciado, Christina Sharpe, Joshua Whitehead, and Virginia Woolf.

Winter 2027

ENGL 5006W: Studies in Theory II
Topic: Theories of Authorship, from Plato to AI
Prof. Travis DeCook

“What is an author?” is a perennial question, currently at the heart of debates over intellectual property, the nature of cultural production, and so-called “artificial intelligence.” This seminar will explore theories of authorship articulated by Plato, Sidney, Shelley, Freud, Nietzsche, Eliot, Borges, Barthes, Foucault, and others. We will examine topics such as inspiration and its secularization; the relationship between the “death of the author” and politics; the ethics of authorship; the origins of intellectual property; notions of social authorship; the relationship between the material book and concepts of authorship; the implications of new media; contemporary “post-copyright” cultural formations; and the implications of artificial intelligence for how we understand the nature of authorship.

ENGL 5606W: Studies in Twentieth Century Literature
Topic: Nabokov and the Social
Prof. Dana Dragunoiu

Nabokov’s image as a life-long champion of liberal freedoms is not false. Having been raised in late-imperial Russia, doomed to a life of exile by Soviet dictatorship, and chased out of Europe by the rise of Nazi totalitarianism, he produced a body of work that consistently defended the individual against the collective. Since he arrived in the United States, however, his career unfolded against a backdrop of constitutionally protected freedoms and weak collectives. The seminar will focus on the second half of his career during which his defence of liberal freedoms is accompanied by a new concern for the life of the collective. We will read closely the four novels on which his English-language reputation rests: Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire, and Ada. We will read these in parallel with selections from leading figures from social and economic anthropology, such as Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Maurice Godelier, Christopher Gregory, Janet Carsten, Françoise Héritier, and Marshall Sahlins. The aim of the seminar is to trace the extent to which Nabokov’s post-war fiction becomes preoccupied with ideals that convene under the rubric of the social, such as community, loyalty, and solidarity.