CoursesSenior Seminars

This is a comparative course examining Latinx Caribbean poetry from the 1960s to the present. Through poetry, we will attend to how the Caribbean archipelago extends far beyond its physical geography and into a U.S. Latinx cultural imaginary. In doing so, we will trace poetic counterhistories that critique nationalist and colonial frameworks by thinking through the ways in which history bears on the present. To do so, we will adopt various theoretical frameworks that draw from performance studies, ecopoetics, and translation studies to support our close readings practices. The class is designed to develop students’ skills and confidence in analyzing poetry in general while attending to the particular poetics of the Caribbean. Together, we will think critically about the geographies of Latinx literature—from various locales in the United States to the Caribbean itself—to ask what poetry in particular can tell us about the histories and constructions of these places. The poets include: Richard Blanco, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, Oliver Baez Bendorf, and Jasminne Mendez among others.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.

This course invites us to think about the ways that medicine and community have shaped the histories and literatures of the United States. Beginning with the early colonial violence that defined European–Indigenous relations for centuries to come, we will ask ourselves two sets of questions: first, how do historical conceptions of illness and health set the terms through which writers imagine their communal ideal? Second, what are the strategies of inclusion and exclusion that continue to determine the boundaries of our public health debates? Reading from a number of genres including novels, poems, essays, memoirs, and pamphlets, we will consider the limits of our knowledge and vocabulary as we inquire into the meaning of immunity, susceptibility, knowledge, conspiracy, treatment, care, and medicine.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.

Title and topic TBD.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.

This course explores the genre of the illness narrative across historical periods with a particular focus on the problem of representing pain. Elaine Scarry, in her classic study The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1987), famously claimed that “to have great pain is to have certainty, to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt,” while Virginia Woolf in “On Being Ill” (1926) deplores the dearth of literature on illness in the aftermath of her own. How can illness, pain and suffering be narrated when they defy words? We will attempt to answer this question by reading a wide range of literary, philosophical, and critical texts on pain.  These may include sections of John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624), novelist Frances Burney’s mastectomy narrative (1812), the poems of Emily Dickinson, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980), Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face (1994), and Eula Biss’s “The Pain Scale” (2005). We will explore pain “in relation,” as the disability studies scholar Alyson Patsvas puts it, in order to better understand it as a historical construct and a source of knowledge, while also considering the vexed relationship between disability studies and health humanities. Requirements include several discussion-board posts, an oral presentation, and a final project which could include your own personal narrative.

In this seminar we try to answer two basic questions that should interest all students of literature: what is a novel, and why does it matter? We will approach these questions from two related areas of inquiry, including (1) the novel’s historical emergence as a massively popular culture phenomenon over hundreds of years of its development, and (2) the novel as a distinct literary genre with its own narrative conventions, techniques, standards of truth and value, as well as conceptions of human character. Both of these areas have been the subject of intense theoretical speculation. Seminar students will read the most provocative and engaging statements about the novel form important writers over the last hundred years or so, and will use their insights to analyze two or three novels from different historical time periods. Requirements include oral presentations, group work, class discussion, short papers, and a longer final paper.

This course will undertake a detailed study of the four works that make up Shakespeare’s second tetralogy of English history plays: Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2, and Henry V.  Along the way, we will acquire some familiarity with Shakespeare’s chronicle sources and dramatic precedents; competing early modern historiographical models and methods; genre theory; performance theory; the political situation and social concerns of England in the late 1590s when the plays are written (i.e., not just the early 1400s, when the plays are set); and the needs of a harried property manager.  We will also sample some of the many filmed treatments of these plays.

This is a comparative course examining Latinx Caribbean poetry from the 1960s to the present. Through poetry, we will attend to how the Caribbean archipelago extends far beyond its physical geography and into a U.S. Latinx cultural imaginary. In doing so, we will trace poetic counterhistories that critique nationalist and colonial frameworks by thinking through the ways in which history bears on the present. To do so, we will adopt various theoretical frameworks that draw from performance studies, ecopoetics, and translation studies to support our close readings practices. The class is designed to develop students’ skills and confidence in analyzing poetry in general while attending to the particular poetics of the Caribbean. Together, we will think critically about the geographies of Latinx literature—from various locales in the United States to the Caribbean itself—to ask what poetry in particular can tell us about the histories and constructions of these places. The poets include: Richard Blanco, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, Oliver Baez Bendorf, and Jasminne Mendez among others.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.

This capstone seminar is based at UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, which is in the Adams District of Los Angeles. The Clark Library houses the largest archive of Oscar Wilde materials in the world. The seminar aims to introduce students to advanced methods in archival research. The curriculum covers many aspects of Wilde’s career, from this time lecturing in the United States in 1882 to his period of exile in France and Italy after his release from prison in 1897. Sponsored by the Ahmanson Foundation, the seminar carries an award of $1,000 for all students who successfully complete the class.

 

Admission is by instructor consent only. Click here to review the application process. Application materials must be submitted to the instructor by 5.00pm PT on Friday, February 6, 2026.

This seminar explores race and gender codings and silences in European and Mediterranean premodern popular romances. How do chivalric knights and ladies negotiate the compromises and double-binds of pursuing their own desires and amassing status and memorial reputations within their communities? How do romances manage characters that arrest the attention of other characters and readers alike by using cultural ideals to challenge norms? Conversely, how do characters pass invisibly under social radars? What tactics can leverage social orders into new shapes? Text may include: Yde and Olive, Dhat al-Himma, Roman de Silence, Romance of Moraien, the Lais of Marie de France, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and her successors, and contemporary theories of race, gender, and sexuality.

 

Requirements: Weekly in-class response paper (30%), and a seminar term project comprised of prospectus, bibliography, drafts, and final version (50%), and a class presentation of that project (20%).

This capstone seminar takes Rachel Carson’s influential book as a starting point to engage the oceanic imaginary in visual arts, film, and literature. We will engage Indigenous, feminist, and postcolonial approaches to understanding the deep ocean, and the current threats to local ecologies, such as DDT and other kinds of toxic dumping. The course will include interdisciplinary readings about the ocean and its complex meanings and representations, mandatory attendance of Rebeca Méndez’s installation The Sea Around Us the first week of class, as well as attendance at a symposium and film screening at the Hammer Museum. Assignments include a material contribution to our interdisciplinary ocean studies library, such as an essay, poster, or book.

 

Enrolls via department consent: Enrollment is restricted to students who can attend The Sea Around Us viewing during week 1 of the spring quarter. To request enrollment from the department, click here. (The enrollment request link will go live at 9 am on February 9.)

This course traces the evolution of the ancient Mediterranean epic into the medieval romance, with a focus on character types, narrative patterns, imagery and themes — especially war, justice, the city or kingdom, religion, eros, and the journey or quest. Books are drawn from the following list: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Augustine’s Confessions, Beowulf, The Song of Roland, Chrétien de Troyes’ Lancelot, The Romance of the Rose, The Lais of Marie de France, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur. Assignments include weekly reports on assigned topics, reading quizzes or exercises, and a final research paper presented at a tenth-week mini-conference.

 

Admission by instructor’s permission (PTE). Applicants should submit a list of literature courses taken so far, a brief (100-200 word) description of their educational goals, and a 5-10 pp. writing sample from a previous course. All materials should be sent as a PDF attachment to this email address: <ejager@humnet.ucla.edu>. No Google.docs, please!

Reading a selection of “history” plays across Shakespeare’s canon, this course invites students interested in making sense of these plays in our current moment. We will explore the scholarly field of early modern history plays, and traditional ways of reading them. The course asks students to reconsider historical chronologies and genre as an organizing principle for the plays. Students will have the opportunity to approach the plays in new ways beyond the familiar reading of these plays as cohering around power dynamics, and notions of masculinity and war, as we incorporate alternative, non-normative versions of history.

We live in a world of systems and networks, ceaseless communications and social media. But what that means, and what it looks like, and feels like, may be another story—or range of stories.

 

This course will look at contemporary novels, and  visual culture, that stage those stories, and reconsider how we live in and with  these circuits and networks today, in the world interior of capital.

Readings will include recent novels by, for example, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ling Ma, Cormac McCarthy, Sayaka Murata; and Natsuo Kirino, accompanied by film and visual arts.

As a Capstone course, participation is mandatory. Students will briefly present on the texts and on their projects related to the course; and engage in shared discussions. The final project may take the form of a term paper or presentation.

 

Not open for credit to students who have previously taken the same topic with Prof. Seltzer in lecture or seminar.

This course invites us to think about the ways that medicine and community have shaped the histories and literatures of the United States. Beginning with the early colonial violence that defined European–Indigenous relations for centuries to come, we will ask ourselves two sets of questions: first, how do historical conceptions of illness and health set the terms through which writers imagine their communal ideal? Second, what are the strategies of inclusion and exclusion that continue to determine the boundaries of our public health debates? Reading from a number of genres including novels, poems, essays, memoirs, and pamphlets, we will consider the limits of our knowledge and vocabulary as we inquire into the meaning of immunity, susceptibility, knowledge, conspiracy, treatment, care, and medicine.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.

Title and topic TBD.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.