The course is organized around the three pillars of the Harney Collaborative Specialization: ethnicity (and other predicates of groupness), immigration, and pluralism. Academic and political debates around each of these topics are marked by antinomies: Are ethnicity, race, and nationhood substantive categories, deeply rooted in culture, or are they constructed either through the choices of individuals or the machinations of interest-seeking elites? Is immigration a specific mode of human migration, premised on the organization of the world into a system of nation-states, or one of many kinds of human mobility that should not be privileged? Is the quest for pluralism a step toward greater justice, especially for historically oppressed groups, or a ruse meant to reinforce already existing differentials in power?

The course is divided into three parts, each addressing these and related questions. Part I explores ethnicity, gender/sexuality, race, and nationhood; Part II focuses on immigration/mobility and citizenship in the industrialized democracies and Global South; Part III turns to debates around pluralism, including arguments for and against multiculturalism.

An introduction for reading knowledge to the oldest literary form of English, with discussion of readings drawn from the surviving prose and verse literature.

This course is devoted to a collaborative reading and analysis of the Old English poem Beowulf: its language, its cultural and historical backgrounds, and its style. The work of our class will rely on close and informed attention to the poem's language and rhetorical strategies. In addition, we'll begin to explore some of the more technical aspects of studying Old English verse: possible topics include metrical analysis, paleography, and/or the problems of dating and authorship.

An archival turn in medieval drama studies began in the 1970s with the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project; it has since been reinvigorated by the digital humanities. For better or worse, we still cannot talk about York's Corpus Christi plays — a cycle of 47 short plays, each based on a different Bible story, each produced on open-air wagon stages by a different local guild from c. 1377 to 1569 — without also talking about York's contemporaneous civic, financial, and legal records. Students will read through all the York plays (at first with help from a modern-spelling edition, then in untranslated Middle English) and through much of the archives gathered in REED's York volume — to discover for ourselves what they may reveal about the extant plays, or about other plays now lost — alongside readings from relevant scholarship. Meanwhile, this course will also offer light training and experience in digital humanities, archiving, and indexing, by teaching students (with help from REED staff) how to convert the old hard-copy text of REED: York into a searchable XML document, and then by requiring them to demonstrate those skills in real (if short) contributions to e-REED's online York Prototype.

What did it mean to be an "author" in late-medieval England? How do premodern writers compete for authority with scribes and readers? Are fifteenth-century autobiographical narrators literary fictions or biological selves? To answer these questions, we will explore how two of the most exciting and original fifteenth-century English writers, Thomas Hoccleve and Margery Kempe, establish their voices while writing under the conditions imposed by manuscript culture. We will read Thomas Hoccleve's cycle of five poems, The Series, and his earlier Le Male Regle, as well as The Book of Margery Kempe, the first autobiography by an English writer. Both authors have produced some of the most personal works in medieval England. Hoccleve's poems try to process his struggles with mental health and personal loss, while Kempe's extravagant, larger-than-life personality breaks new ground in women’s literature and life-writing. We will discuss premodern concepts of authorship, (auto)biography, social identity, gender, and mental health, alongside exploring material culture. We will follow cutting-edge research and examine Hoccleve's and Kempe's works in surviving manuscripts, some of which were written in their author's own hand.

This seminar will allow for examination of topics related to Canadian literature. Topics in any given year will vary but may include a range of themes and issues emerging from Canadian prose (fiction and non-fiction), poetry, drama, and other genres and forms. Course may be taken more than once for credit as long as it is a separate section code/subtitle. Course topics for the upcoming year will be posted on the departmental website.

This seminar will allow for examination of topics related to African Canadian literature. Topics in any given year will vary but may include a range of themes and issues emerging from African Canadian prose (fiction and non-fiction), poetry, drama, and other genres and forms. Course may be taken more than once for credit as long as it is a separate section code/subtitle. Course topics for the upcoming year will be posted on the departmental website.

This seminar will allow for examination of topics related to Asian Canadian literature. Topics in any given year will vary but may include a range of themes and issues emerging from Asian Canadian prose (fiction and non-fiction), poetry, drama, and other genres and forms. Course may be taken more than once for credit as long as it is a separate section code/subtitle. Course topics for the upcoming year will be posted on the departmental website.

This course explores Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the context of several different critical approaches, such as historicism, formalism, intertextuality, gender studies, and textual criticism. We read the Canterbury Tales in their entirety, examining some of the interpretive issues with which recent Chaucer criticism has been most concerned, and considering relevant ancient and medieval sources and analogues.

A study of Piers Plowman, the fourteenth-century alliterative dream vision famously described as "a commentary on an unknown text." This course will focus on the B-text of the poem with excursions into the A and C texts, giving special attention to issues including economic and social justice, poverty and perfection, legal and literary representation, learning and study, and the relationship between Latin and the vernacular. Throughout, we will investigate the way that Piers uses literary form to express and analyze ethical and spiritual dilemmas. We will also survey major literary critical approaches to the poem and its late fourteenth-century context.

An introduction to the varied forms and practices of early modern life-writing, including diaries, familiar letters, spiritual autobiographies, conversion narratives, martyr stories, personal essays, financial account books, and spousal memoirs. Our primary aim will be to examine the multiple, sometimes conflicting, possibilities for writing a life, whether one’s own or another’s, during a period of profound and often violent religious and political change. Our secondary aim will be to engage some of the experimental and methodological approaches by which novelists, critics, and historians, from Virginia Woolf to Saidiya Hartman, have sought to narrate untold life stories in ways that confront and creatively surmount the opacities of the archive or the historical record. Together we will consider how these approaches might limit or expand our own efforts to understand, and represent, how early modern individuals lived and wrote about their lives.

This course will have two main goals. First, we will read and discuss modern scholarship on asexuality, the sexual orientation often characterized by or defined as a lack of sexual attraction. We will investigate asexuality as a queer identity, and talk about how the study of asexuality has the potential to bring new perspectives to queer theory. Second, we will think about what it means to look for and read for asexuality in history. We will read sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, asking what it means to look for asexuality and aromanticism beyond the twentieth century. We will continually ask not just how to build an “asexual archive” — how to find traces of asexuality and aromanticism in the past — but also how the particular shapes of asexuality that we find in early modern texts might help us rethink modern allonormativity (the assumption that everyone experiences sexual attraction) and amatonormativity (the assumption that most people should be striving to be in romantic pairings or couples).

This seminar will allow for examination of topics related to American literature. Topics in any given year will vary but may include a range of themes and issues emerging from American prose (fiction and non-fiction), poetry, drama, and other genres and forms. Course may be taken more than once for credit as long as it is a separate section code/subtitle. Course topics for the upcoming year will be posted on the departmental website.

This seminar will allow for examination of topics related to African American literature. Topics in any given year will vary but may include a range of themes and issues emerging from African American prose (fiction and non-fiction), poetry, drama, and other genres and forms. Course may be taken more than once for credit as long as it is a separate section code/subtitle. Course topics for the upcoming year will be posted on the departmental website.

While the digitization of early English printed books has revolutionized literary scholarship, a massive field of textual production, one that permeated every facet of early modern life, remains comparatively understudied: manuscripts. Poetry, drama, prose fiction, letters, diaries, depositions, wills, recipe books — the rich and varied manuscript archive offers ever-expanding horizons for research as new digitization projects are making manuscripts around the world more accessible than ever before. This seminar will introduce participants to a wide range of manuscript genres while providing sustained practice in paleography. We will begin by examining the kinds of manuscripts most closely relevant to literary study (authorial holographs, verse miscellanies, dramatic scripts, playhouse documents) and move on to other forms of manuscript production of the time (letters, government documents, commonplace books, financial records). The goals of this seminar are: to introduce participants to the scope of early modern manuscript culture; to develop participants’ skills in transcribing early modern hands; to provide orientation to the resources that will allow participants to locate and access manuscripts; and to give participants a sense of the new research possibilities on manuscript sources.

This seminar will allow for examination of topics related to Asian American literature. Topics in any given year will vary but may include a range of themes and issues emerging from Asian American prose (fiction and non-fiction), poetry, drama, and other genres and forms. Course may be taken more than once for credit as long as it is a separate section code/subtitle. Course topics for the upcoming year will be posted on the departmental website.

A study of the poetry and prose of John Milton (1608-74), with a look at some examples of his decisive influence on the literary, political, and religious writing of succeeding centuries. The course will examine the poet's three major works, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, attending as well to the central schools of Milton criticism of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Topics to be explored will include Milton's shocking innovations in poetic form, political philosophy, and religious belief, as well as his controversial treatment of such subjects as the relation of the sexes, the right to divorce, and the ongoing permissibility of polygamy. In addition to the major works of Milton, noted above, the course will feature an additional examination of Milton's indelible mark on the poet William Blake, whose Book of Urizen we will study as a critique of Milton's representation of the creation of the universe.

This course asks: how was the early modern English theater theorized by detractors, defenders, playwrights, actors, and audiences? What does early modern drama teach us about how the theater works? And, how can examples from the early modern theatre inform or complicate key paradigms of performance theory in the present? This course will serve as an introduction to the broad sweep of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English drama and a sustained investigation into how the early modern theatre develops and refines its formal protocols, concepts that continue to animate theater today. Our inquiry in this course will take shape around three sets of texts: early modern polemical writing about the theater that aims to take stock of its efficacy and perilous possibility (such as anti-theatrical writing by Philip Stubbes, Stephen Gosson, William Prynne, and others); early modern plays that seem especially interested in interrogating how the theater works (including The Spanish Tragedy, Mucedorus, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The Alchemist, The Silver Age, A Game At Chess, and The Roman Actor); and contemporary theoretical work on performance that accounts for the theater's formal operations (likely including work by Tavia Nyong'o, Peggy Phelan, Joseph Roach, Rebecca Schneider, Bert States, Diana Taylor, and others).

This course affords an opportunity for seminar members to read Shakespeare's tragedies in dialogue with the extraordinarily rich tradition of criticism on the tragedies. Each seminar meeting will focus on a specific tragedy, opening up four areas of discussion. 1) The first topic concerns the structure and larger architecture of each play, considering such topics as generic experimentation, imitation and invention, and elements of plot construction oriented to thematic, rhetorical, or theatrical effect. 2) The second identifies and interrogates major issues that have arisen in the critical conversation, whether interpretive, textual, contextual, or performative. 3) The third focus of discussion will be close reading, experimenting with various rhetorical, linguistic, or critical approaches to a selected scene or episode. 4) Finally, looking to the present and future, we consider new directions and emerging (or unimagined) topics, asking what might constitute productive routes for fresh research. The course should be of interest to all those planning graduate research in Shakespeare and early modern literature, to potential teachers, and to those interested in Shakespeare’s exceptional literary achievement.

In this course we will investigate how the texts, meanings, and ideological affordances of Shakespeare's plays have been shaped and reinvented by successive generations of theatre artists from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. With a focus on Anglophone theatre, primarily in Britain and the U.S., we will trace how and why certain plays by Shakespeare disappear from the repertory and reemerge at other times, sometimes in radically altered forms, even as Shakespeare (in markedly different configurations) remained central to the Anglophone theatrical tradition over the centuries. Our investigations will focus on two related issues: on the one hand, the changing status of the text in discussions and practices of theatre making, and the effects of the rise of the scholarly textual editor on theatrical practices; and on the other hand, the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays have functioned as occasions for negotiating questions of gender, race, and (nationalist) politics.

This course will explore the wide range of ways that Shakespeare and early modern literature intersect with the field broadly known as book history. Since the emergence of the New Bibliography in the early twentieth century, scholarly work on the changing forms of Shakespearean texts, from the early printed quartos to the digital editions of today, has become increasingly shaped by an awareness of the political, economic, social, and aesthetic factors that influence the production, dissemination, reception, and remediation of literary works as material objects, most recently informed by a growing attention to race, gender, and sexuality. Working with both theoretical and historical scholarship, this course will introduce students to a variety of methods for studying the book (broadly conceived) with attention to the new research directions in early modern literature that these methods support. Topics addressed may include the idea of the book in drama, manuscript culture, early modern printing technologies, book design, the economics and politics of publication, reading and book use, theories of editing, authorship and canon formation, global receptions of Shakespeare on the page, archives and libraries, and digital remediations.

Our aim in this course is to trace the development of comic fiction from Henry Fielding to Jane Austen (with perhaps a glance ahead to Dickens). Discussions will focus on form and genre; print culture and the demands of the market; gender, sexuality, and the courtship plot; the unfamiliar world of eighteenth-century humour; social hierarchies and class relations, and many other topics. Students will have ample opportunity to pursue individual research interests. Secondary readings will take in the complex recent scholarship on the rise of the novel, reception history, and the history of reading. We will pay special attention to the increasing influence of women writers (notably Burney and Austen) and will persistently question the long neglect of comic fiction and entertainment in the overall rise of the genre. These topics are now supported by statistical analysis and large-scale cumulative scholarship in April London's forthcoming Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel (2023-24).

This seminar will allow for examination of topics related to Indigenous literature. Topics in any given year will vary but may include a range of themes and issues emerging from Indigenous prose (fiction and non-fiction), poetry, drama, oral tradition, and other genres and forms. Course may be taken more than once for credit as long as it is a separate section code/subtitle. Course topics for the upcoming year will be posted on the departmental website.

This course investigates the phenomena of liveness and presence, ca. 1750-1830. It considers what it was (and is) to be there: to exude presence, to feel the presence of another, and to experience the thrill that comes from a sense of participation in a collective moment. We will immerse ourselves in a world of theatrical performances, outdoor gatherings, art exhibits, public readings, protests and revolts, religious events, and encounters with nature and will do so through their depiction in art, literature, and the news. In our exploration of matters including embodiment, feeling, ephemerality, spatiality, and perception, we will adopt an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on theatre and performance studies and on work that engages with affect theory, media studies, and visual studies. What, we'll ask, can we learn from past depictions of the experience and eventfulness of immediacy? How might it offer a lens through which to understand cultural production both then and now?

Satire was a predominant mode in early modern literature and the focus of a complex critical and ethical debate. This course reads a range of satiric texts, from the well-known verse of Swift and Pope to obscurer topical pamphlets and the graphic satires of Hogarth and Rowlandson. In Fielding and Burney, we will study two novelists who extended the genre to narrative fiction. Alongside these primary texts, we will explore a wide range of theoretical and literary-historical contexts, including the value and limitations of generic categories; the history of eighteenth-century studies (especially the persistent use of "satire" as a label for recuperating long-scorned texts); changing interpretations of the ancient satirists; early-modern debates over the nature and acceptability of laughter; and metaphorical and literal connections between satire, public punishment, and the infliction of pain. Also important will be class perspectives; the representation of deformity and disability (and recent developments in "Disability Studies"); the apparent misogyny of many texts; and aesthetic conventions such as scatology and the grotesque.

Censorship is not only an instrument of control or suppression but also, Annabel Patterson has argued, a discipline to which we partly owe our concept of literature as a discourse with characteristics of its own. While supervising what could be said, and how, censorship could also stimulate ingenious strategies of circumvention, from clandestine presses and decoy imprints to elaborate literary techniques of irony and ellipsis. In important ways, the changing institutions and mechanisms of press regulation in Britain, from pre-publication licensing to libel prosecution and the spectacle of the pillory, may have energized literary production as much as they also constrained it. This is a familiar proposition for Renaissance England (also, in Robert Darnton's work, for Enlightenment France), and we begin with key episodes and texts from the press licensing era, which ended in 1695. At the heart of the course is the eighteenth-century and Romantic-era use of seditious libel prosecution to perform the work of censorship by alternative means, and we examine the implications for poetry, drama, satire, and the novel across the extended period. The course ends with the persistence of blasphemy and obscenity as (in Joss Marsh's term) "word crimes" in the early Victorian period.

This seminar will allow for examination of topics related to diasporic, postcolonial, and transnational literature. Topics in any given year will vary but may include a range of themes and issues emerging from diasporic, postcolonial, and transnational prose (fiction and non- fiction), poetry, drama, and other genres and forms. Course may be taken more than once for credit as long as it is a separate section code/subtitle. Course topics for the upcoming year will be posted on the departmental website.