Graduate Seminars

Introduction to profession of literary studies. Covers wide array of topics including state of discipline; scholarly organizations and conference presentations; critical and methodological approaches to literary studies; writing and publishing for scholarly and general audiences; building curriculum vitae and résumé; developing professional skills; understanding academic job market and humanities careers.

This class will offer a graduate-level introduction to studying the Victorian novel and a practical course in formal analysis of the novel. We will explore deeply one extraordinary nineteenth-century novel, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1851–53). Dickens’s novel ramified across the ocean, where it influenced Hannah Crafts, an enslaved woman recently escaped from North Carolina, and, in conjunction with reading Bleak House we will also read Craft’s novel—“possibly the first by a Black woman anywhere”—The Bondswoman’s Narrative, written circa 1853–1861, published in 2002. Both these literary texts will ground a series of readings in novel theory. Theorists we will read may include M.M Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Catherine Gallagher, Jack Halberstam, Toni Morrison, Raymond Williams, and Sylvia Wynter.

 

This course meets the post-1800 breadth requirement.

This course uses various histories of Atlantic medicine and illness to investigate the basic terms that inform literary criticism. Our primary goals will be to recognize how medical and caregiving practices structure colonial encounters, to explore the relation between medicine, community, and citizenship, and to imagine how the formal legacies of colonial medicine might guide us toward new and productive modes of analysis in the contemporary world.

 

This course meets the pre-1800 breadth requirement.

In this seminar, we will consider new directions in recent Asian American literature, including novels and collections of short stories and essays, alongside interdisciplinary scholarship in Asian American studies that engages with literature, art, performance, film, and video. The seminar will be an opportunity for students to discuss contemporary shifts, interventions, and developments in Asian American literature and Asian American studies. In particular, we will prioritize Asian American studies scholarship that intersects with other fields including, but not limited to, queer studies, disability studies, performance studies, and food studies.

 

This course may meet the post-1800 breadth requirement OR the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. Students may apply the course to only one of the above breadth requirements, and final seminar paper must cover territory within that breadth area.

This class will trace two main investigative arcs. One will focus on an introduction to key critical figures and concepts in the unfolding of a Chicanx literary heritage. The other will focus on current critical issues relating to discussions of biopower as a manifestation of modernity, of the end of modernity and history, and considerations of the posthuman. The first arc will serve to familiarize us with the field of Chicanx literary studies while the second will provide the opportunity to explore exciting and challenging theoretical formulations together, Course work, besides active attendance, includes an annotated bibliography and a final research project.

 

This course may meet the post-1800 breadth requirement OR the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. Students may apply the course to only one of the above breadth requirements, and final seminar paper must cover territory within that breadth area.

This course aims to introduce graduate and advanced undergraduate students to basic concepts, theories, and methods in research on narrative across the media of fiction, nonfiction, fictional film, documentary film, videogames, graphic novels, and digital forms of narrative on and off social media. Each week, we will explore a basic dimension of narrative (for example, narrators, major and minor characters, or narrative endings) and narrative in a particular medium (for example, fiction, graphic novel, or videogames).

The class will explore storytelling situations, plot structure, character construction, fictionality and nonfictionality, cultural story templates, modes of reading/viewing narrative, image-text relations, cross-media translation, audiences, and fan communities. We’ll also survey different approaches to these issues, from sociological, feminist, and critical-race approaches to theories that emphasize empirical study, quantitative tools, and digital media. The course materials will emphasize environmental forms of storytelling in particular as a focus and point of departure for analysis; students will be encouraged to explore and apply the theoretical and methodological tools to their own areas of interest and research in narrative across different languages, genres, periods, and media.

The class is designed as a combination of short introductory lectures on crucial concepts, paradigms, and traditions with extensive seminar discussions.

 

This course may meet the post-1800 breadth requirement OR the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. Students may apply the course to only one of the above breadth requirements, and final seminar paper must cover territory within that breadth area.

This course will survey recent trends in media theory, internet studies, digital culture, speculative aesthetics, and video game studies. We’ll work through a range of monographs from the very recent past alongside works of digital art, video games, and media poetics. The “speculative” gesture of this course looks at how (new) weird game imaginaries might surface otherwise invisible aspects of network culture and digital platforms, up to and including ongoing developments in AI, LLMs, and other emergent media platforms.

 

This course meet the post-1800 breadth requirement OR the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. Students may apply the course to only one of the above breadth requirements, and final seminar paper must cover territory within that breadth area.

From the medieval to the modern periods, dictionaries in forms ranging from word-lists and vocabularies to glossaries and lexicons have served as compendia of knowledge across disciplines, genres and languages. Who made them and why? What principles governed their composition? How effectively did they capture the meanings of words key to their times and places? What light, if any, can dictionaries shed on the relationship between language and knowledge, between words and the world in our premodern past as well as in our present?

 

This course will help you investigate the ways in which dictionaries writ large are not merely repositories of knowledge but shape the world in which they circulated. We will explore a cluster of medieval and early modern words as defined in various dictionaries and used in contemporary texts. As our cluster will have to be really small, our focus will be on words that were once significant for their complexity not only in specific disciplines of law, politics and theology but also in literary works by writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, Margery Kempe, John Milton, William Shakespeare, and Margaret Cavendish. The literary critic and novelist Raymond Williams called such words keywords, defining them as terms that invoke complex and contradictory meanings –meanings that are both particular and relational for different speakers and writers, and in and through the past and present.[1] Such keywords as we will consider include “nature,” “culture,” “virtue,” “truth,” “kind,” “gender,” “animal,” “human,” “conscience,” “commons,” “yeoman,” “proud,” “good,” “gentil,” “estate” and “race.” As and when possible, we will also consider corresponding keywords in Latin and vernacular languages including German, Italian, French and even Russian. We will attend to the extent to which different dictionary entries capture and convey the meanings of a keyword. At the same time, we will track the multiple usages of the same keyword and the meanings it generates within and across texts in different disciplines. As we examine keywords as defined by dictionaries and as used by writers, we will explore among other things how the problems of each keyword’s meanings are inextricably bound up with the issues that the same word is used to discuss.[2]

Although our main focus will be on medieval and early modern dictionaries, we will also have occasion to explore modern dictionaries that record the afterlife of the keywords we will study. Along the way, we will learn about different historical principles of lexicography and the extent to which dictionaries are both descriptive and prescriptive.

The dictionaries we will consider include Huguccio of Pisa’s Derivationes (12th century), Giovanni Balbi’s Catholicon (13th century), the Promptorium Parvulorum (15th century), Thomas Elyot’s Dictionarie (16th century) as well as Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (18th century) and A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (the 19th and 20th century progenitor of the OED).

Questions for discussion include the following. How comprehensively do dictionary entries on a keyword convey the complexity of its usages found in texts from multiple disciplines? Where do two or more contemporary dictionaries differ in their definitions of the same keyword and how do their different definitions impact the keyword’s relationship to the world within and beyond a particular discipline? What meanings of a keyword does a dictionary entry foreground, relegate to the background or simply exclude? What implications for knowledge-making can we draw from such lexicographical acts of inclusion, relegation, and exclusion? What kinds of thinking about a keyword do different dictionaries defining the same keyword promote or suppress?

Our speakers will include archivists, lexicographers, contributors to lexicons and medievalists. Here are some potential speakers: the OED archivist Beverley McCulloch, the lexicographers Colin Howlett (editor of the Oxford Russian Dictionary) and Carolinne White (assistant editor of the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources), the medievalists Eric Weiscott (Boston College) and Gabriela Kompatcher-Gufler (Univ. of Innsbruck) as well as UCLA’s own Debora Shugar, H.A. Kelly, and Chris Chism (all of whom have worked on multilingual dictionaries).

[1] Raymond Williams, Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 23; I have adapted Williams’ words.
[2] Williams, Keywords, 15.

 

This course may meet the pre-1800 breadth requirement OR the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. Students may apply the course to only one of the above breadth requirements, and final seminar paper must cover territory within that breadth area.

The “long form” is how Roland Barthes characterized the novel in a series of lectures given between 1978-1980 at the Collège de France in Paris. This seminar will investigate “the long form” by way of a sustained reading of Henry Fielding’s (long) novel, Tom Jones (1749). Our investigation of Tom Jones will be aided by various supplemental readings, eighteenth-century and otherwise, culminating in a reading of Kate Brigg’s 2023 novel, The Long Form, which centers on a single day in the life of a single mother as she dips in and out of Fielding’s Tom Jones.

 

This course meets the pre-1800 breadth requirement. 

This course traces out the oceanic turn in the humanities, with an emphasis on postcolonial and Indigenous methods and approaches. We will examine contemporary literature (poetry, short stories and the novel), visual arts, and films that represent the ocean as a space of migration, climate change, embodiment, fluidity, habitation, mining, and a place for an engagement with nonhuman others as well as alternative knowledges and ontologies. We will examine the relationship between empire and the oceans through postcolonial, feminist, and Indigenous methodologies, with a particular emphasis on texts from the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands. Authors and artists to be considered include Derek Walcott, Epeli Hau`ofa, Tony Capellán, Keri Hulme, Rivers Solomon,  Witi Ihimaera, Stacy Alaimo, and Astrida Neimanis. The course is taught in conjunction with the Oceanside Museum of Art’s PST exhibition, Transformative Currents: Art and Action in the Pacific Ocean, which runs through January 19, 2025. Please do try to see the exhibit before the start of the term, but we will coordinate a trip to Oceanside as part of the class as well. In addition to attending the exhibition, requirements include active class participation, weekly forum postings, a presentation, and a final essay/project.

 

This course meets the post-1800 breadth requirement.

Writing workshop designed for English PhD students who are preparing for their Part II qualifying examinations, typically taken by end of their fourth year. Students draft dissertation prospectus and bibliography by end of quarter.

 

Please note this workshop can be taken for an S/U grade only and cannot count toward the coursework requirement for the Ph.D.

Questing is central to many romances, with new forms of subjectivity and public accountability their prize.  Some romances are regenerative there-and-back-again journeys, where the quest only becomes meaningful during the back-at-court debrief where public recognition is ratified.  However other romance quests are one way, generating new relationships while destroying others, experimenting with new forms of bodily enablement and disability, and instigating unintended world-transforming (and sometimes very grim) consequences. This class explores open-ended and unfinished romances that take a voyage out never to return.  How do such quests critique normative social and political structures, subjectivities, and organizations of gender, race, and status?  How does the formal suspense of a quest implicate operations of desire and invite authors and readers to experiment in new literary forms?  How do premodern genres of romance both contribute to and resist subsequent imperial and colonial epistemologies of power?

Texts may include:  The Quest of the Holy Grail, Hoccleve’s The Series, the Middle English Beves of Hampton, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, the Romance of Moraien, the Roman de Silence, and Malory’s Morte D’Arthur. Secondary texts may include Jacque Lacan’s Seminar VII, Susan Crane, Edouard Glissant, Helen Cooper, Edward Said, Diane Taylor, and Marcel Elias.

This course meets the pre-1800 breadth requirement.

Over the last few decades, the cultural and historical study of disability has emerged as a vital field of inquiry, transforming how we understand various forms of corporeal and cognitive difference in the early modern period. In turn, the increasing scholarly focus on earlier periods has pressing implications for our constructions of disability in the present. This course aims to foster two overlapping and mutually illuminating conversations: one about the role that theory plays in how we represent and interpret archival sources, and another about how the archive invites us to critique the historical assumptions and (occasional) limitations of theoretical inquiry. In short, how does the simultaneous embrace of the archive and theory promise to open up new horizons both for the study of early modern disability and for disability studies? This course builds on a conference I co-organized on this subject, held at the Clark Library in 2022, as well as a symposium to be held at the Huntington Library in February, 2025.  We will put a variety of 17^th and 18^th-century texts in conversation with current disability theory and history.  The course will also feature a range of guest speakers in early modern literary studies, archival studies, and disability studies.

 

This course may meet the pre-1800 breadth requirement OR the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. Students may apply the course to only one of the above breadth requirements, and final seminar paper must cover territory within that breadth area.

This seminar focuses on the development of aestheticism and decadence from the 1860s to 1900, with particular reference to a range of British, Indian, Irish, and South African writers. Readings include works by Algernon Charles Swinburne, D. G. Rossetti, Walter Pater, Toru Dutt, Olive Schreiner, George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne), Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), and Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper).

 

This course may meet the post-1800 breadth requirement OR the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. Students may apply the course to only one of the above breadth requirements, and final seminar paper must cover territory within that breadth area.

Detailed description coming soon.

 

This course may meet the post-1800 breadth requirement OR the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. Students may apply the course to only one of the above breadth requirements, and final seminar paper must cover territory within that breadth area.

Structured as writing workshop. Determination of what publishable article looks like. Independent revision of student work. Circulation of student papers. Class-wide discussion of writing.

 

Please note this workshop is taken for an S/U grade only and cannot count toward the coursework requirement for the Ph.D.