Students and faculty in the English Department study traditional British and American literatures as well as the great variety of literatures from around the globe. Writing is integral to every course in the English major, and students engage in critical and creative writing projects of varying lengths. While developing skills in careful reading and research, many students take poetry or fiction workshops and take courses in argumentation, screenwriting, or business writing.
Many courses use new media and film, and focus on visual rhetoric and cultural studies. In theoretical courses students explore perspectives ranging from critical race theory, to feminist criticism, postcolonialism, semiotics, and queer theory.
Submissions from 2012
The Challenges of Oral History in the 21st Century: Diversity, Inequality and Identity Construction Using Online Video Oral Histories in University Courses across the Curriculum, Gail Gradowski and Jill Goodman Gould
Christianity, John C. Hawley
Colonialism and Mandates, John C. Hawley
"I Enter Into Its Burning": Yvonne Vera's Beautiful Cauldron of Violence, John C. Hawley
Disciplinary Resistance: Promoting Possibility for the Writing Program, Amy J. Lueck
Submissions from 2011
Female Bodies and Capitalist Drive: Leonora Sansay's Secret History in Transoceanic Context, Michelle Burnham
Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer as Indigenous Gothic, Michelle Burnham
Trade, Time, and the Calculus of Risk in Early Pacific Travel Writing, Michelle Burnham
Gender, Genre and Slavery: The Other Rowson, Rowson's Others, Eileen Elrod
Writing Without Sound: Language Politics in Closed Captioning, Amy J. Lueck
Writing the Self in ‘Heterotopic’ Spaces: Reading Nawal Sadaawi’s Woman at Point Zero, Aparajita Nanda
Abundance, William Rewak
La Señora, William Rewak
The Day, William Rewak
Submissions from 2010
Authentic Education: The Example of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, Phyllis Brown
Rhetoric and Reception: Guillaume de Machaut’s ‘Je Maudi, Phyllis Brown
Ignatian Values in the Core Curriculum, Phyllis Brown and Diane Jonte-Pace
Samuel Gorton’s Leveller Aesthetics and the Economics of Colonial Dissent, Michelle Burnham
Phillis Wheatley’s Abolitionist Text: The 1834 Edition, Eileen Razzari Elrod
Holocaust Remembrance: Making Meaning through Oral History across the Generations, Gail Gradowski, Jill Goodman Gould, and Anne Saldinger
Jihad as Rite of Passage: Tahar Djaout’s The Last Summer of Reason and Slimane Benaïssa’s The Last Night of a Damned Soul, John C. Hawley
The Colonizing Impulse of Postcolonial Theory, John C. Hawley
Re-writing the Bhabhian “Mimic Man”: Akin, the Posthuman Other in Octavia Butler’s Adulthood Rites, Aparajita Nanda
Remembering Fess Parker, William Rewak
Submissions from 2009
Life Stories from the Holocaust: Bringing Oral History into the Digital Classroom, Jill Goodman Gould and Gail Gradowski
Submissions from 2008
Teaching Lolita in a Course on Ethics and Literature, Marilyn Edelstein
Biafra as Heritage and Symbol: Adichie, Mbachu, Iweala, John C. Hawley
Introduction to LGBTQ America Today, John C. Hawley
Introduction: Unrecorded Lives, John C. Hawley
No Simple Highway: Finding a New Meaning of Home in El Salvador, Juan Velasco
Submissions from 2007
Heading South, John C. Hawley
Modern Warfare, William Rewak
Submissions from 2006
Land, Labor, and Colonial Economics in Thomas Morton's "New English Canaan", Michelle Burnham
"Archaic Ambivalence": The Case of South Africa, John C. Hawley
Edward Said, John Berger, Jean Mohr: In Search of an Other Optic, John C. Hawley
Theorizing the Diaspora, John C. Hawley
Identity Politics and the Voice of Autobiography in Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café, Aparajita Nanda
A Prayer to the U.S., Juan Velasco
Submissions from 2005
Rosemary Cramp: The Hilde of Durham, Phyllis Brown
Textual Investments: Economics and Colonial American Writing, Michelle Burnham
Multiculturalisms Past, Present, and Future, Marilyn Edelstein
Joanna Brooks, American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African and Native American Literatures, Eileen Elrod
Lavender Ain’t Pink: Emerging Queer Self-Expression in a Non-White World, John C. Hawley
Boundless Practice, Juan Velasco
Poem to a Soldier, Juan Velasco
The Future of the U.S, Juan Velasco
Submissions from 2004
Hrotsvit's Sapientia as a Foreign Woman, Phyllis Brown
Epistolarity, Anticipation, and Revolution in Clara Howard, Michelle Burnham
Review: Time and Space in American Literary History, Michelle Burnham
Mapping Utopia: Spatial and Temporal Sites of Meaning, John C. Hawley
Postcolonial Theory, John C. Hawley
The Emerging Fictionalization of AIDS in Africa, John C. Hawley
The War of the Worlds, Wells, and the Fallacy of Empire, John C. Hawley
Automitografías: The Border Paradigm and Chicana/o Autobiography, Juan Velasco
Faith, Juan Velasco
Loss, History and Melancholia in Contemporary Latin American Cinema, Juan Velasco
Submissions from 2003
The Periphery Within: Internal Colonialism and the Rhetoric of U.S. Nation-Building, Michelle Burnham
Ardashir Vakil, John C. Hawley
Can the Cosmopolitan Speak: The Question of Indian Novelists’ Authenticity, John C. Hawley
Counter-Imperial Masculinity: The Case of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840-1922), John C. Hawley
Firdaus Kanga, John C. Hawley
Submissions from 2002
Pomo Basketweaving, Poison, and the Politics of Restoration in Greg Sarris's Grand Avenue, Michelle Burnham
Review: Perpetual Emotion Machine, Michelle Burnham
R. K. Narayanswami B.A.B.L. Engine Driver": Story-Telling and Memory in The Grandmother’s Tale, and Selected Stories, John C. Hawley
Performing Multiple Identities: Guillermo Gómez-Peña and His Dangerous Border Crossings, Juan Velasco
The Cultural Legacy of Self-Consciousness: An Interview With Lourdes Portillo, Juan Velasco
Submissions from 2001
"However Extravagant the Pretension": Bivocalism and U.S. Nation-Building In A Narrative ofthe Life of Mrs Mary Jemison, Michelle Burnham
Sexual discrimination and women’s retention rates in science and engineering programs, Theresa Conefrey
Moses and the Egyptian: Religious Authority in Olaudah Equiano's Iteresting Narrative, Eileen Razzari Elrod
The Bombay Boys of Mira Nair, Firdaus Kanga and Ardashir Vakil, John C. Hawley
La forja de la identidad nacional: La familia Chicana en la literatura de José Antonio Villarreal y Luis Valdez., Juan Velasco
Submissions from 2000
Cycles and Change in Beowulf, Phyllis Brown
Heloise, Dialectic, and the Heroides, Phyllis Brown and John C. Peiffer II
Merchants, Money, and the Economics of “Plain Style” in William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, Michelle Burnham
Laboratory talk and women’s retention rates in science, Theresa Conefrey
My Mother's Legacy: Trying to Make a Difference through Teaching and Research, Marilyn Edelstein
Gus Lee, John C. Hawley
The Role of Sexuality in Nation-Building: Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy and Timothy Mo’s The Redundancy of Courage, John C. Hawley
Submissions from 1999
A Voice Restored: Louise Labé's Impersonation of Sappho, Phyllis Brown
Harriet Wilson and the White Reader: Authority and Audience in Our Nig, Eileen Razzari Elrod
The ‘Gag Rule’ and the Church, William Rewak
Submissions from 1998
"I Lied All the Time": Trickster Discourse and Ethnographic Authority in "CrashingThunder", Michelle Burnham
I Did Not Make Myself So. . .’: Samson Occom and American Religious Autobiography, Eileen Razzari Elrod
Freya Stark, John C. Hawley
Making Disciples of All Nations, John C. Hawley
Ngugi wa Thiong’o., John C. Hawley
Submissions from 1997
Louise Labé and Semiramis: A Feminist Reading, Phyllis Brown
The Interplay of Language and Music in Machaut's Virelai 'Foy Porter', Phyllis Brown and William Peter Mahrt
Anne Hutchinson and the Economics of Antinomian Selfhood in Colonial New England, Michelle Burnham
Gender, culture and authority in a university Life Sciences laboratory, Theresa Conefrey
Rebellion, Restraint, and New England Religion: The Ambivalent Feminism of Mary Wilkins Freeman, Eileen Razzari Elrod
A College President’s ABC’s, William Rewak
Roadrunner, William Rewak
Submissions from 1996
Constructing voices in writing research: Developing participatory approaches to situated inquiry, Ann M. Blakeslee, Caroline M. Cole, and Theresa Conefrey
Evaluating qualitative inquiry in technical and scientific communication: Toward a practical and dialogic validity, Ann M. Blakeslee, Caroline M. Cole, and Theresa Conefrey
Beccel and the theme of death in Guðlac B, Phyllis Brown
Between England and America: Captivity, Sympathy, and the Sentimental Novel, Michelle Burnham
Again another solution by "Daddykins”: Socializing family roles in narrative, Theresa Conefrey
Ethics and Contemporary American Literature: Revisiting the Controversy over John Gardner's On Moral Fiction, Marilyn Edelstein
Truth is Stranger than Non-Fiction: Gender, Religion, and Contradiction in the Works of Rose Terry Cooke, Eileen Razzari Elrod
