CoursesSenior Seminars

For various cultural reasons, sexuality is a particularly sensitive political subject. Indeed, sexual representation remains one of the few cultural forms that is guaranteed to elicit a strong response. Our class will provide students with the research and analytical tools to investigate the causes and effects of those personal and political responses. More specifically, we will use contemporary gender, race, class, and sexuality theories (among others) to help us examine sexual representations in terms of the shaping force they have in our lives. Our examination of a cultural force involves defining key terms, such as “power,” to interrogate how details of key representations manifest their cultural and personal work (effects on people’s values and conditions of existence, for example), on social justice. In other words, students will learn to interpret and explicate representations of sexuality in terms of their manipulation of power. Students will learn to define key terms and interpret cultural representation in an academic dialogue with their peers and with scholars in their field.

 

By the end of the course students will have initiated and executed a research plan that explores an issue based on the student’s personal interest

 

By the end of the course students will understand and use productively the rhetoric of scholarship, the ways of enriching, honing, and bolstering an interpretation by way of secondary sources

 

By the end of the course students will know how to provide helpful feedback about their peers’ works-in-progress; as authors, they will know how to assess and make use of the feedback they receive

 

By the end of the course students will demonstrate–in a 12-15 pp essay–effective organizational strategies leading to a coherent and compelling large-scale argumentative analysis.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

This Senior Capstone seminar delineates and interrogates the idea of a homogeneous “Asian American Experience” by way of texts that challenge, subvert, or simply chuck that model minority myth out the window. Readings will focus on contemporary Asian American voices publishing within the last five years, writers who are introducing new perspectives, styles and subject matters to the English language literary canon. We will analyze and discuss notions of “bad” and “bad kids” in the works of Asian American writers who portray themes that include but are not limited to: race, ethnicity, boredom, sexuality, mental health, religious marginalization and rebellion. We will also look at issues of class, family, love, and friendship as portrayed by second-generation, first-generation, and one-point-five generation immigrant writers. How do their voices differ and what stylistic and thematic similarities are shared?  The course covers work by Anthony Veasna So, Ling Ma, Rachel Khong, Ed Park, Cathy Park Hong, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Hua Hsu and others.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

This capstone seminar is eligible for credit towards the Creative Writing minor. Students in the minor who are graduating in Winter 2026 may contact the English undergraduate advising office to request enrollment, space permitting.

This capstone seminar will study the poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886). We will approach our subject from several vantages, studying Dickinson’s poetics and the form and style of her work; the material practices of her compositions, including her use of letters and manuscript books; the history of editing her poetry for publication; and the history of her reception by readers, poets, filmmakers, composers, and literary critics. Since this is a capstone course, students will have the option to write a research paper on a topic of their design, or to create another kind of project inspired by Dickinson’s work.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

Since the 1960s and 70s, during the feminist movement and up until the present, women have been making performance art that centers around their bodies, rendered excessive, vulgar, imperiled, or beautiful. Through a range of feminist performance, this course considers the body as a site for interrogating gender and sexual difference, alongside texts in feminist theory, queer theory, and performance studies. How does the differentially marked body in performance expose and collapse the gendered, racialized divides between subject/object, power/powerlessness, pleasure/pain? How does performance not only repeat and maintain gender norms, but interrupt and transform them? Rather than ask what the body in feminist performance is, we will ask what it does. Artists in the course may include Marina Abramovic, Nao Bustamante, Patty Chang, Vaginal Davis, Zackary Drucker, Coco Fusco, Sharon Hayes, Xandra Ibarra, Ana Mendieta, Yoko Ono, Adrian Piper, Carolee Schneemann, and Julie Tolentino, among others.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

In this seminar, we read Laurence Sterne’s genre-defying novel Tristram Shandy (published between 1759 and 1767). And then we read it again. The course has two broad aims. The first is to immerse ourselves in a rich and influential text and to develop accounts of it that toggle between formal and political analysis. The second aim is to reflect on the process and temporality of encountering a text. To this end, we’ll read a selection of additional texts that consider what it means to re-read or re-encounter an aesthetic object. The course is grounded in the view that recursivity, and dilating the time we spend with a text, are special features of literary study—and that foregrounding these aspects of our discipline might be ways of resisting the capitalist demands of hyper-productivity and burnout culture.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to senior English majors.

What do we do when we “do theory”? Is theory a universal, objective mode of “critical thinking,” or is this specialized discourse itself molded by histories of global capitalism? We will start by studying a staple Western genealogy of theory: the rise of the Frankfurt School, followed by the French structuralist and post-structuralist turns. We will examine how the professionalization of theory came to valorize high philosophy at the expense of other plebeian forms, such as reportage and pamphlet. In the second half, we will excavate an altogether different genealogy of theory from the trenches of anticolonialism. We will examine how mass political movements in the Global South transformed the professional idea of a “theorist,” and also challenged the existing divisions of intellectual labor. Students will revisit the popular debates between Western Marxism, Postcolonial Theory, and Subaltern Studies. They will also immerse themselves in a variety of new theoretical writings that blend ethnography and philosophy, literary criticism and political economy.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to senior English majors.

The literary critic Raymond Williams has persuasively identified “nature” as “perhaps the most complex word in the [English] language.” In this class, we will grapple with how Romantic literature contributed to making “nature” such a complex word — and where humans do or do not fit into the nature(s) we will be reading about and discussing. For most of the class, we will be focusing on texts from British Romanticism (and learning about / debating what that term means in the first place). However, we will also be making a trip across the Atlantic to consider just a few of the ways that British Romanticism shaped American ideas about nature. Throughout the class, we will also engage with recent scholarly writing that will help illuminate different facets of our readings.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to senior English majors.

Elizabeth Gaskell is at once both one of the most famous and one of the most underappreciated authors of nineteenth-century England. Her fame largely comes from her realist novels depicting brutal capitalist factory relations in Manchester, where she lived. “Industrial novels,” they were called. But Gaskell also wrote ghost stories and other short tales about all kinds of things. These short works have mostly remained unstudied. In this course, we will recover some of Gaskell’s short stories that seem especially concerned with gender. How do her tales address gender? What does she do with the gothic tradition? Mysteries? How do her tales render sexuality? What formal techniques does Gaskell develop in writing her short stories? This course involves generating questions together about Gaskell’s short fiction and individually pursuing a research essay on a topic of your choice.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to senior English majors.

For various cultural reasons, sexuality is a particularly sensitive political subject. Indeed, sexual representation remains one of the few cultural forms that is guaranteed to elicit a strong response. Our class will provide students with the research and analytical tools to investigate the causes and effects of those personal and political responses. More specifically, we will use contemporary gender, race, class, and sexuality theories (among others) to help us examine sexual representations in terms of the shaping force they have in our lives. Our examination of a cultural force involves defining key terms, such as “power,” to interrogate how details of key representations manifest their cultural and personal work (effects on people’s values and conditions of existence, for example), on social justice. In other words, students will learn to interpret and explicate representations of sexuality in terms of their manipulation of power. Students will learn to define key terms and interpret cultural representation in an academic dialogue with their peers and with scholars in their field.

 

By the end of the course students will have initiated and executed a research plan that explores an issue based on the student’s personal interest

 

By the end of the course students will understand and use productively the rhetoric of scholarship, the ways of enriching, honing, and bolstering an interpretation by way of secondary sources

 

By the end of the course students will know how to provide helpful feedback about their peers’ works-in-progress; as authors, they will know how to assess and make use of the feedback they receive

 

By the end of the course students will demonstrate–in a 12-15 pp essay–effective organizational strategies leading to a coherent and compelling large-scale argumentative analysis.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

In Public Shakespeares we will explore ideas of the public, and consider the state of the humanities, as well as the history of Shakespeare as a cultural commodity. In project based work we will develop ways of using Shakespeare as a resource to engage with the public to effect change. Alongside our readings of five Shakespeare plays, we will consider how Shakespeare can be used to engage different publics, and develop plans to leverage Shakespeare to reach diverse audiences, whether it be through use of media platforms, or through live drama in public spaces on and beyond our campus. This class also includes the opportunity to run a Shakespeare performance workshop for students in a local elementary school.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to senior English majors.

The unlikely story of the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, has fascinated scholars and general readers alike—how could it be that not one or two but three authors whose works would live on after their untimely deaths could emerge from a single family in an isolated Yorkshire village? Indeed, the legend of the Brontës is always in danger of eclipsing the works themselves. In this capstone seminar, we will read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). We will consider these novels in their social, historical, and artistic contexts, examining each through a variety of critical lenses, and will discuss how the mystique of the Brontë family story and its r/Romantic backdrop has shaped our expectations as 21^st-century readers of these novels.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to senior English majors.

This Senior Capstone seminar delineates and interrogates the idea of a homogeneous “Asian American Experience” by way of texts that challenge, subvert, or simply chuck that model minority myth out the window. Readings will focus on contemporary Asian American voices publishing within the last five years, writers who are introducing new perspectives, styles and subject matters to the English language literary canon. We will analyze and discuss notions of “bad” and “bad kids” in the works of Asian American writers who portray themes that include but are not limited to: race, ethnicity, boredom, sexuality, mental health, religious marginalization and rebellion. We will also look at issues of class, family, love, and friendship as portrayed by second-generation, first-generation, and one-point-five generation immigrant writers. How do their voices differ and what stylistic and thematic similarities are shared?  The course covers work by Anthony Veasna So, Ling Ma, Rachel Khong, Ed Park, Cathy Park Hong, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Hua Hsu and others.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

This capstone seminar is eligible for credit towards the Creative Writing minor. Students in the minor who are graduating in Winter 2026 may contact the English undergraduate advising office to request enrollment, space permitting.

This seminar will study a wide range of poems from 1600 to the present. Students will write brief response-papers and a substantial final paper, in addition to some in-class writing. Most importantly, students must come to each session well prepared to participate in an honest, energetic, courteous, and informed discussion of all the assigned poems.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to senior English majors.

In an effort to call attention to planetary climate change, some geologists have named the ‘Anthropocene’ as a radical new geological epoch of environmental change akin to a meteor strike. They attribute the origins to the global rise of agriculture, nuclear radiation, and plastics. Yet scholars in the social sciences and humanities have pressed against this universal narrative to ask which humans are really making the impact? They point to histories of empire, militarism, and globalization as fundamental causes, and raise questions as to how to tell the Anthropocene story (or stories) with attention to both local context and planetary scale. This interdisciplinary course explores the Anthropocene debate from the perspective of writers, artists, and filmmakers, particularly from islands in the global south. It turns to key concepts in the emergent field of Anthropocene studies such as climate, weather, scale, and species. The course will be particularly concerned with Postcolonial and Indigenous perspectives, especially the relationship between land and (rising) sea. Requirements include active class participation, weekly posts on our website, a short presentation, and a final research paper/project.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to senior English majors.

COLLEGE HONORS STUDENTS: 10 additional seats are being held in reserve for College Honors students in need of Honors Collegium credit. To request enrollment, please contact the English undergraduate advising office via MyUCLA MessageCenter.

This course is eligible for capstone credit towards the Literature & the Environment minor. Declared L&E minors may contact Steph Bundy at stephanie@english.ucla.edu to request enrollment.

This capstone seminar will study the poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886). We will approach our subject from several vantages, studying Dickinson’s poetics and the form and style of her work; the material practices of her compositions, including her use of letters and manuscript books; the history of editing her poetry for publication; and the history of her reception by readers, poets, filmmakers, composers, and literary critics. Since this is a capstone course, students will have the option to write a research paper on a topic of their design, or to create another kind of project inspired by Dickinson’s work.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

Since the 1960s and 70s, during the feminist movement and up until the present, women have been making performance art that centers around their bodies, rendered excessive, vulgar, imperiled, or beautiful. Through a range of feminist performance, this course considers the body as a site for interrogating gender and sexual difference, alongside texts in feminist theory, queer theory, and performance studies. How does the differentially marked body in performance expose and collapse the gendered, racialized divides between subject/object, power/powerlessness, pleasure/pain? How does performance not only repeat and maintain gender norms, but interrupt and transform them? Rather than ask what the body in feminist performance is, we will ask what it does. Artists in the course may include Marina Abramovic, Nao Bustamante, Patty Chang, Vaginal Davis, Zackary Drucker, Coco Fusco, Sharon Hayes, Xandra Ibarra, Ana Mendieta, Yoko Ono, Adrian Piper, Carolee Schneemann, and Julie Tolentino, among others.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.