This online first-year seminar will introduce students to fundamentals of literary and cultural studies with an emphasis on understanding how literature interacts with popular genres like the ghost story, science fiction, the weird tale, and the superhero story. Students can expect to study poetry, short stories, novels, and comic books with special attention paid to the way authors use literary form and genre conventions to create meaning. The fall term will feature texts in which ghosts, time-travel, and the colonization of outer space are tropes used to foreground contemporary issues around modernity, imperialism, race, gender, and power; the winter term will feature texts in which aliens, nonhuman monsters, weird environments, and superheroes are used to explore these topics, while also foregrounding new themes in ecology, sexuality, and history. Over the course of the year, students will receive training in the foundations of close reading and textual analysis. They will also learn how to do library research, engage meaningfully with secondary sources, and hone their own scholarly writing. Finally, students will have opportunities to practice creative writing (poetry, nonfiction, and fiction) for certain assignments. Since this is a “blended” online seminar, we will have one 1-hour synchronous online meeting most weeks; the remainder of the course will be conducted asynchronously in the form of weekly video lectures, readings, and short online discussion forum assignments. In addition to selected poems and short stories that will be made available digitally, we will study the following works: H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895); Samuel R. Delany, Nova (1968); Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979); H. P. Lovecraft, At The Mountains of Madness (1936); Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, and John Totleben, Swamp Thing (selected issues; 1984-85); Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation (2014); and Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000).