Graduate Seminars

The Proseminar is an introduction to the profession of literary studies. The course will cover a wide array of topics related to issues in the profession and professionalization, including (but not limited to): the structures and histories of the discipline; writing and publishing for scholarly and general audiences; scholarly organizations and conference presentations; building a CV; understanding the academic job market; humanities careers; critical and methodological approaches to literary studies; and navigating the university as an institution.

In the first half of 2026, Los Angeles hosted the two-part exhibition MONUMENTS, which “reflect[ed] on the histories and legacies of post-Civil War America as they continue to resonate today.” The widely-acclaimed exhibition presented decommissioned Confederate monuments alongside contemporary artworks at a moment when questions of racism, memory, and history were being vigorously contested in politics and public life. This seminar will address concerns similar to those explored in MONUMENTS but will focus primarily on the contemporary novel. We will be particularly interested in the relations between history, memory, trauma, and politics (especially, but not uniquely in the US), and will draw on the resources of cultural memory studies as well as scholarship on the historical novel and contemporary fiction in general. We will begin with two canonical novels of historical memory—Toni Morisson’s Beloved and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz—and then will turn to a series of twenty-first century works, potentially including Teju Cole’s Open City, Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, Jesmyn Ward’s Sing Unburied Sing, and Eduardo Halfon’s Mourning, among others. We will also read critical and theoretical work by Aledia and Jan Assmann, Stephen Best, Astrid Erll, Saidiya Hartman, Marianne Hirsch, Alexander Manshel, Ann Rigney, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and others.

 

 

This course meets the post-1800 breadth requirement. 

The central intellectual and ethical question that inspires this seminar is the following: how are scholars of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic world to do their work in a political climate that is openly hostile to studies of the nation’s racial past and that works aggressively to erase historical narratives contradicting the twin pillars of Christian Nationalism? As such, our core premise is that the colonial era was fundamentally diverse even though our histories of the period might not be; that without recognizing this fact, we cannot hope to understand the period or the legacy of modernity we have inherited from the past. We will sketch out the spatial, temporal, and methodological boundaries of the early Black Atlantic by drawing from Anglophone texts written by authors of African and European descent. As we do so, we will aim to push the conceptual limits of familiar narrative categories and ask how the Black Atlantic reshapes our understanding of the structures and methods of literary study. We will ask what we mean by voice, speech, silence, authorship, and authority in a Literature Department and investigate these concepts in relation to a broad constellation of forms, genres, and modes of mediation.

 

This course meets the pre-1800 breadth requirement. 

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 read Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1851–53), Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Topics discussed will include genres from historical fiction to the Gothic; the nineteenth-century history of sexuality, gender, class, race, and empire; and the forms of fiction especially free indirect discourse, serialization, and character. Our aim will partly be to explore influential theoretical approaches, and theorists we will think about may include Benedict Anderson, Nancy Armstrong, Judith Butler, M. M. Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Catherine Gallagher, Georg Lukács, Eve Sedgwick, Hortense Spillers, Sandy Stone, Raymond Williams, and Sylvia Wynter. This course aims for students to work explicitly on the craft of researching and writing a scholarly article. To that end, students may write on any novel from any place and period, or on any literary work from the nineteenth-century. This course has a heavy reading and writing load.

 

 

This course meets the post-1800 breadth requirement.

Although Marx’s work has been frequently caricatured – the charges span “Eurocentrism” to “teleology” – his ideas have nonetheless formed the lifeblood of literary cultures in colonial / postcolonial societies. This course will introduce students to different peripheral adaptations of Marxism. Apart from reading some of Marx’s own writings, we will engage a range of peripheral figures who have repurposed his ideas in diverse, even disparate historical situations.

 

Our readings will pivot around a set of key conceptual questions. First, we will explore how these peripheral Marxisms challenge the metropolitan presumptions of cultural studies. Is the close reading of a poem really so far removed from the study of, say, political economy or psychology, as we seem to firmly believe? As a counterpoint, we will examine how these shapeshifting peripheral formations dramatically expand our idea of “culture.” Second, while delimiting the objects of our study, the existing divisions of academic labor have also shaped the genres of our criticism and theory. As a counterpoint, we will trace how these peripheral Marxists tried out different forms of writing – essay, pamphlet, diary, reportage – to smuggle ideas across disciplinary checkpoints of various kinds. Along the way, we will also compare and scrutinize particular buzzwords that long been a staple in our own academy (eg. “commodification,” “posthumanism,” “anthropocene”).

Apart from classical figures – Mahdi Amel, Walter Rodney, Uno Kōzō, José Carlos Mariátegui – our readings will cast a wide net across discourses of colonialism, ecology, gender, and race. Readings may include Gayatri Spivak, Harry Harootunian, Rebecca Karl, Kohei Saito, Stuart Hall, Aijaz Ahmed, Richard Price, and Kirsten Ghodsee.

Students will be encouraged to cultivate a sustained, open-ended writing practice throughout the course. They will also be expected to develop a research project in their own discipline and area of interest. Advanced undergraduate students can be admitted with instructor’s consent.

This course meets the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement.

The Environmental Humanities approach environmental change as a set of processes and crises that are defined, experienced, and managed differently depending on divergent languages, cultural assumptions, social structures, historical memories, media and communications. This seminar will offer graduate students from across different disciplinary fields an overview of how anthropology, cultural geography, literary and cultural studies, history, and philosophy approach environmental change, with an emphasis on the role of different cultural lenses. We will consider theories, methods, and findings concerning the following topics: visions of ideal, degraded, and restored nature; the Columbian Exchange, colonialism, postcolonialism, and decolonial thought; environmental justice and multispecies justice; gender and sexuality; race and ethnicity; Indigenous stewardship; energy imaginaries; forms of activism; and the narrative construction of environmental futures. Course materials will include theoretical and analytical readings as well works of environmental art, film, and literature. Students will be encouraged to develop research projects in their own discipline and area of interest. Advanced undergraduate students can be admitted with instructor’s consent.

 

This course meets the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. 

Diversifying the Classics research group meeting, two hours. Limited to graduate students. Collaborative translation of early modern Hispanic plays to English. S/U grading.

 

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

Geoffrey Chaucer never met a genre he didn’t twist.  In the late fourteenth century, he frankensteined romance with philosophical treatise in Troilus and Criseyde, ruptured hagiography with dynasticism in the Man of Law’s Tale, and undercut sermon with boast in the Pardoner’s Tale. The dream visions of The Book of the Duchess and the House of Fame splint source texts together in eerie anamorphoses, playing the epic against the deflatingly mundane and unexpectedly experimental.  This class explores Chaucer’s speculations across three genres: dream vison, hagiography, and exemplary fable, in the light of other medieval intertexts. How do his works complicate the judgments of late medieval readers  and presage affective alienations to come?

 

Texts may include selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, House of Fame and Book of the Duchess, Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina Clericalis, Marie de France’s Lais, and The Book of Margery Kempe and its hagiographic intertexts.

Requirements:  lively participation, 10-minute class presentation with discussion (20%), weekly response papers (30%), and either 2 conference length papers, or one longer term paper/project (50%).

 

This course meets the pre-1800 breadth requirement.

 

Course description coming soon.

 

This course meets the pre-1800 breadth requirement.

This course will examine the literature of rights in the long nineteenth century U.S.

 

This course meets the post-1800 breadth requirement.

Course description coming soon.

 

This course meets the post-1800 breadth requirement.

Diversifying the Classics research group meeting, two hours. Limited to graduate students. Collaborative translation of early modern Hispanic plays to English. S/U grading.

 

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

This course examines refugee literature from Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, while offering a broader introduction to research in migration studies, on the one hand, and to some key scholarly genres on the other: the book review, the abstract, the conference paper, and the syllabus. As we will see, much early medieval English literature was resolutely engaged with enduring questions of displacement and hospitality. What did it mean to lose your community or your king, or to welcome a stranger into your hall? Reading across poetry, history, and the law, we will examine the literature of exiles, outlaws, and the earliest sanctuary spaces with facing-page translations for non-specialists.

 

This course meets the pre-1800 breadth requirement.

Course description coming soon.

 

This course meets the pre-1800 breadth requirement. 

Course description coming soon.

 

This course meets the post-1800 breadth requirement.

Course description coming soon.

 

This course meets the post-1800 breadth requirement.

Diversifying the Classics research group meeting, two hours. Limited to graduate students. Collaborative translation of early modern Hispanic plays to English. S/U grading.

 

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