2026 Winter

2026 Winter

NOTE: Schedule subject to change
As of February 2, 2026
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ENGL 510A-001 - Early Medieval Literatures - Mo Pareles

Translating the Middle Ages  

Term 1 
MON, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM 

“‘I have been a stranger in a strange land,’ but the land of my sojourning cannot bear me…Nu?” So we took off by ourselves and stayed together two whole years. Me, I was ready to stay with him for the rest of my life, but better you should ask for the moon from heaven.

Al-Ḥārith, fictional admirer of the brilliant con artist Abū Zayd and the speaker above, appears in al-Ḥarīrī of Basra’s maqāmāt, written in Arabic around 1100. Yet in the passage above, one of fifty award-winning experimental mini-translations of al-Ḥarīrī by Michael Cooperson, he speaks a New York English inflected with Yiddish, an exaggerated twentieth-century Jewish-American vernacular. How did this come to be and what does it tell us about medieval histories of Jewish and Islamic literary intimacy? For that matter, why are there so many recent, experimental English-language translations of medieval Arabic literature and of other medieval literature? How did we get a queer, postcolonial version of the Old English Seafarer, and a fascist, modernist one? How long has this wave of literary translations been going on? What are its ethics? What does translation theory help us understand about medieval literature and all literature, about diaspora and multilingualism, and about the role of poetics in civic life in the present moment?

In this graduate seminar, students will learn to write a conference paper and present at a conference. They will also have the opportunity and be encouraged to use languages other than English. Primary texts will likely include translations by Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Zadie Smith, Alasdair Gray, Meagan Purvis, Yasmine Seale, Ezra Pound, Juan Gelman, Denis Ferhatovič and others. Secondary readings will likely include medieval translation theory and modern selections by Jhumpa Lahiri, Stuart Hall, Vladimir Nabokov, Lawrence Venuti, Isabel C. Gómez, David Gramling, and many others. Readings may also be shaped by student interest and linguistic background.

ENGL 514A-001 - Early Modern Literature - Dennis Britton

Term 2 
MON, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM 

Shakespeare, Race, and Feeling  

This seminar will examine the intersection of race and feeling in works by William Shakespeare. We will consider how Shakespeare’s plays and narrative poetry produce feelings about non-white people, and how such feelings participate in the production of racial difference, especially whiteness. We will investigate the work Shakespeare’s plays and poetry did within what scholars of emotion call “emotional communities”—composed of people who are moved by similar interests and values—to both produce and destabilize race as a concept. Our Shakespearean works will be Titus Andronicus, The Rape of Lucrece, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. 

ENGL 525A-001 - Literatures of the Long Eighteenth Century - Ramesh Mallipeddi

Term 1 
THU, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM 

Bodies: Person, Flesh, Thing  

The basic premise of the course is that bodies are natural and social, biological and cultural. We have our bodies and we are our bodies. Bodies are both voluntary and involuntary. Our current understanding that the boundaries of one’s self are coextensive with the boundaries of one’s body had its origins in the eighteenth century. Using a broadly historical approach, we will begin with Richardson’s epistolary narrative Pamela (1740) and John Cleland’s 1747 pornographic novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure to consider bodily privacy and its invasions. From there, we will move on to slavery, judicial torture, and incarceration as systems that reduce persons to things and flesh. Readings: Mary Prince’s slave narrative The History of Mary Prince; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Jean Amery’s memoir At the Mind’s Limits; James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk. Finally, to develop the idea that bodies are subject not only to intentional harm, but also to involuntary forces such as sickness or impairment, the class will end with two texts on illness. Critical and theoretical excerpts will be drawn from the work of Hortense Spillers, Didier Fassin, and Jay Bernstein. Requirements: regular attendance and participation; Canvas posts; one 5-page book review; and a final essay.

ENGL 533A-001 - Rhetoric, Theory, Criticism, and Culture - Logan Smilges

Term 1 
WED, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM 

[specific title forthcoming]  

While rhetorical studies has long engaged disability on issues of access and accessibility, scholars such as Tara Wood, Jay Dolmage, Margaret Price, and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson (2014) have urged the field to “move beyond mere lists and individual accommodations.” This seminar sets out to explore that “beyond,” teasing out the conflicts and potentials embedded at the intersection of disability, rhetoric, and activism. Over the course of the semester, we will ask two, interanimating questions: in what ways can we write about and theorize disability rhetorically? And in what ways might experiences of disability “crip” our understanding of rhetoric and rhetorical theory?

Importantly, disability is an embodied experience (rather than a purely theoretical exercise), which means our readings will include a combination of genres, such as memoir, fiction, theory, and graphic literature, that speak to disability’s materiality. The course assignments, too, will demand a kind of engagement with the world of disability that exceeds traditional library research and a final paper. These assignments ask you to take up Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s call to “start noticing” disability in your lives outside of school. Noticing disability is a rhetorical task because it involves rescripting the discourses that we use to name and address bodymind difference. Indeed, this course sits delicately on the border of theory and praxis, urging us to take up scholar-activism by reimagining disability and rhetoric in all aspects of our lives. As this seminar will make clear, studying crip rhetorics requires a commitment to disability liberation.

ENGL 539A-001 - Literatures of the Twentieth Century - Judith Paltin

Term 1 
TUE, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM 

Modernism and the Mass Body 

This seminar course in modernist literature and social theory explores fictional, empirical, and theoretical variations on the historical and narrated worlds of the collectivity, its marginalized and its revolutionists. We will examine theories and case studies of crowds, paradigmatic figures in modern and contemporary fiction, and collective forms of identity, those through which the “core of the self” extends outward, acquiring new repertoires of experience. We will explore theories of agency and layered sovereignties, and phenomena such as group aggression and utopianism, the sophisticated judgments of crowds, populisms and authoritarianisms, bare life and biopolitics. Readings include Woolf, Joyce, Conrad, Eliot, Barnes, Le Bon, Moscovici, Laclau, Ranciere, Hardt and Negri, Raymond Williams, Freud, Bion, Rose, Lacan.

ENGL 539B-002 - Literatures of the Twentieth Century - Miguel Mota

Term 2 
TUE, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM 

Fictions of London 

“Neither of us is English, we’re Londoners you see”
--Sammy, in Hanif Kureishi’s Sammy and Rosie Get Laid

This course will attempt to chart the urban and fictional landscape of the former imperial metropolis and conceptualize a London uneasily situated at the intersection of the material and the imaginary. We will read, watch, and listen to a selection of novels, poetry, films, photographs and recordings from the mid-1950s to the present, and attempt to address such issues as the representation of space in former imperial, now global, centers, and the processes of change (cultural, social, political, aesthetic) that such representations both respond to and produce. We will debate the extent to which these fictions of London are intimately bound up not only with migrant and diasporic, colonial and postcolonial identities, but also with increasing, and in some instances highly troubled, political and cultural ties to Europe and America. Our aim will be to consider London as a complex and conflicted space of intercultural exchange where social and material inequalities are constantly challenged and resisted in imaginative representations within both literary and popular cultural forms.

Tentative list of primary texts: works by Sam Selvon, Colin MacInnes, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Laura Oldfield Ford, Raymond Ontrobus, Derek Jarman, Mike Leigh, Hanif Kureishi, Patrick Keiller, Gilbert & George, Monica Ali, and Zadie Smith. Tentative list of secondary readings: writings by Iain Sinclair, Doreen Massey, David Harvey, Stuart Hall, John McLeod, Edward Soja, and others.

ENGL 541A-001 - Studies in American Literature Since 1890 - Jeffrey Severs

Term 2 
TUE, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM 

Contemporary U.S. Novel: DeLillo, Morrison, Lee 

This seminar will examine in depth works from the 1970s to the 2010s by three of the great U.S. novelists: Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, and Chang-rae Lee. Readings will include most or all of the following texts: DeLillo’s The Names (1982), Libra (1988), and Mao II; Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), Jazz (1993), and Paradise (1997); and Lee’s Native Speaker (1995), A Gesture Life (1999), and On Such a Full Sea (2014).

Our goal will in part be to understand 40 to 50 years of literary and cultural history through figures who, in their monumental power and reach, tend to embody certain periodizing and otherwise explanatory categories but also trouble their boundaries and distinctions, whether those categories be (to name only a few) modernism, postmodernism, paranoia, twentieth-century African American novels, contemporary U.S. literature, historical fiction, transnational U.S. fiction, or immigrant writing. We will also be on the lookout for hidden symmetries and unexpected lines of influence among these writers.

The focus will be on close examination of the novels and on two major writing assignments by each student: a seminar paper of about five pages that will form the basis of discussion in most weeks; and a final research paper at the end of term. Students will also lead discussion in selected weeks and write discussion posts. Essays from each novelist will be part of our reading, and criticism on the syllabus, invoking a wide range of theoretical paradigms, will come from Colleen Lye, Jodi Kim, David Cowart, John McClure, Chris Lee, Lavinia Delois Jennings, Jean Wyatt, John K. Young, Amy Hungerford, and others.

ENGL 542A-001 - Linguistic Structure and Theory - Stefan Dollinger

Term 2 
WED, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM 

Language standards and inclusivity: theory & practice 

This seminar probes theories of linguistic standardization with the express goal of putting them into practice, while using this practice to further inform theory. The corresponding fields of comparative standardology and linguistic standardization are relatively young in their own rights as academic subjects. Their aim to dehegemonize and decolonize contemporary standard varieties, which has become a goal often talked about but rarely put into practice.

We work with current language theory (whether linguistic, rhetorical or otherwise) and sociohistorical approaches to explore concrete, practicable ways to dehegemonize and decolonize western standard (written) varieties in their contexts, starting with Standard Canadian English. Such standard varieties, hailing virtually without exception from imperial-colonial contexts, are all in need of “opening up”, whether via demotization (widening of the standard) or destandardization (replacement of an existing standard) or a combination thereof.

The question of how the dehegemonization is conducted in concrete social contexts is at the vanguard of current work. This seminar is therefore part of the UBC Research Excellence Cluster on Inclusive Standards (see www.canadianwordcentre.ubc.ca for more). A range of additional events (e.g. Research seminar meetings, Open Townhall-Type Faculty Clubs) accompanies this seminar.

Everyone with an interest in standard language and/or inclusion is welcome. No linguistic knowledge is required (but of course most welcome). An openness to view English as reflected in or department’s name (English Language[s] & Literatures), however, is essential.

Participants have the opportunity to do innovative work on an aspect of inclusivity in the context of the Canadian English Dictionary, the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical or, more abstract, theoretical work for the Canadian Word Centre. You may choose to work on another variety of World Englishes (e.g. American English or Jamaican Englishes) or Global Englishes (English as a Lingua Franca), or, if you have a concrete connection, a non-English language.

There is the option to partake with your seminar paper in a thematic collection of papers on Inclusive Linguistic Standard Varieties: Standardization for the 2020s with a major publisher.

The guiding question will be: how can we best distinguish between

  • theoretical approaches that are ideal but perhaps unrealistic to be put into practice (lack of user uptake)

and

  • best practices for “inclusive standards” that may not be ideal but would bring inclusive standards more into the centre of linguistic debate.

 

Optional readings and podcasts in preparation for this seminar:

 

Some scholarly sources for illustration:

Ayers-Bennett, Wendy. 2020. From Haugen’s codification to Thomas’s purism: assessing the role of description and prescription, prescriptivism and purism in linguistic standardization. Language Policy 19, 183–213.

Aryes-Bennett, Wendy & John Bellamy (eds.) 2021. The Cambridge Handbook of Language Standardization. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Costa-Carreras, Joan. 2025. On the Epistemological Status of Comparative Standardology and Standardisation. Caplletra: Revista Internacional de Filologia 78: 249–270.

Dollinger, Stefan. 2019. The Pluricentricity Debate: On Austrian German and Other Germanic Standard Varieties. London: Routledge.

Dollinger, Stefan. 2025. Dialectology as “language making”: hegemonic disciplinary discourse and the One Standard German Axiom (OSGA). In (Dia)lects in the 21st Century: Selected Papers from Methods in Dialectology XVII (Mainz, 2022), ed. by Susanne Wagner & Ulrike Stange-Hundsdörfer, 287–318. Berlin: LangSci Press.

Haugen, Einar. 1966. Language Conflict and Language Planning: the Case of Modern Norwegian. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Horner, Kristine & John Bellamy. 2016. Beyond the micro–macro interface in language and identity research. In Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity, ed. by Siân Preece. London: Routledge.

Joseph, John E. 2006. Language and Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Joseph, John E., Gijsbert Rutten & Rik Vosters. 2020. Dialect, language & nation: 50 years on. Language Policy 19: 161–182.

Muhr, Rudolf & Juan Thomas (eds.). 2020. Pluricentric Theory beyond Dominance and Non-dominance. Graz: PCL-Press.

Oakes, Leigh & Jane Warren. 2007. Language, Citizenship and Identity in Quebec. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Oakes, Leigh & Yael Peled. 2018. Normative Language Policy: Ethics, Politics, Principles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

ENGL 545A-001 - Canadian Literatures - Glenn Deer

Term 2 
WED, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM 

Eating the Text: Reading Culture Through Food, Cooking, and Eating 

Food, cooking, and eating are biologically necessary and socially powerful:

we produce and cook food to survive, but also to reinforce social bonds, to celebrate tradition, to evoke memories of home, to compete with other cooks, to impress the eater, and even to beguile and seduce.

This course will explore food in literature, particularly life narratives, cookbook selections, and films across different cultures and borders, from the transnational to local Vancouver contexts. The production of food is essentially linked to histories of empire, colonial power, capital, racialized and gendered labour, and ecological change. Our discussions will explore these intersections.

Readings will include selections from Gitanjali Shahani (Food and Literature), Sandra Gilbert (The Culinary Imagination), Rachel Laudan (Cuisine and Empire), Sidney Mintz (Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History), Nathalie Cooke and Shelley Boyd with Alexia Moyer(Canadian Literary Fare), Monique Truong (The Book of Salt), MFK Fisher (How to Cook a Wolf), Cheuk Kwan (Have You Eaten Yet?), Fred Wah (Diamond Grill), and Austin Clarke (Pigtails ‘n’ Breadfruit). Films will include Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast, Juzo Itami's Japanese "noodle western" Tampopo, Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman, and the restaurant documentaries of Cheuk Kwan.

ENGL 546A-001 - Studies in Commonwealth/Postcolonial Literatures - Christine Kim

Term 1 
FRI, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM 

Cold War Legacies in Asia and the Asian Americas 

The period post-WWII until the 1980s is conventionally understood in the West as the Cold War. Marked by events such as the Cuban missile crisis, the war in Vietnam, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, these years are remembered as a tense time when it seemed that the conflict between communist and capitalist democratic ideologies might result in the outbreak of nuclear war. At the same time, it is important to remember that these same tensions played out very differently in Asia and took the form of multiple bloody and violent wars.  This course will return to this historical period in order to rethink what is conventionally remembered in the West as a conflict between the US and the USSR as a struggle that also involved—and, indeed, was staged in—Asia.

We will consider the legacies of these hot wars in Asia as they have been experienced in Asian North America and critiqued by diasporic and transpacific scholars, writers, and filmmakers. Our readings will be drawn from various fields that include Asian diaspora studies, critical refugee studies, inter-Asian cultural studies, Indigenous studies, Asian Canadian and Asian American studies, and transpacific critique. We will ask how, what critic Jodi Kim calls the “protracted afterlife” of the Cold War, continues to influence current conversations about migration, citizenship, human rights, race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, and imperialism.

ENGL 546B-001 - Studies in Commonwealth/Postcolonial Literatures - Tolulope Akinwole

Term 2 
THU, 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM 

The Postcolonial Incredible 

The African cultural theorist Tejumola Olaniyan describes the disenchantment of the postcolonial subject after colonialism as “the postcolonial incredible.” He characterizes this situation as marked by “an outlandish infraction of ‘normality’ and its limits.” This course sits with that characterization of the postcolonial. We will proceed with two aims in mind. The first is to consider the term “postcolonial.” We will discuss the postcolonial condition through the works of thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, Anthony Appiah, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Achille Mbembe. As we sit with these thinkers, we will ask the following questions of the postcolonial: What is the post in postcolonial? Who inhabits the postcolonial? How is the postcolonial inhabited? Having sorted through all this, we will turn to the second aim of this course: exploring the specific condition of the postcolonial which has been termed “the postcolonial incredible”—political situations in which the postcolonial state is characterized by unbelievable events. Under the rubric of the postcolonial incredible, we will study postcolonial texts such as Femi Osofisan’s Kolera Kolej, Ola Rotimi’s Holding Talks, Jane Taylor’s Ubu and the Truth Commission, Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross, and S. Labou Tansi’s Life and a Half. 

ENGL 551A-001 - Studies in Literary Movements - Daniel Heath Justice

Term 1 
TUE, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM 

[specific title forthcoming]

[specific description forthcoming]

ENGL 553A-001 - Studies in Literary Theory - Jordy Rosenberg

Term 1 
WED, 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM 

This seminar will explore advanced topics in gender and sexuality. Please contact english.graduate.program@ubc.ca for a full course description.

ENGL 555A-001 - Studies in Literature and the Other Arts - Mary Chapman

Term 2 
FRI, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM 

Writing the American Self in the Long 19th Century 

This seminar is organized around the theme of the self­–self-making, self-deception, self-reliance, self-expression, self-deception, self-representation-–in US literature from the long nineteenth century. We will begin with a hip hop opera based on the biography of the US’s first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, one of the first self-made men in America. We will then read nonfiction about self-reliance by an early environmentalist (Thoreau) and a philosopher (Emerson); fiction about self-deceptive (Melville); lyric (self-expressive) poetry by Whitman and Dickinson; life-writing by a formerly enslaved person (Jacobs) and the first Asian North American author (Sui Sin Far); followed by a novel written not by an individual but by a collective of authors. The last few weeks of the course will focus on two contemporary works of multi-generational life-writing (Chin and Graver).

PRIMARY TEXTS WILL INCLUDE: 

Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton: The Revolution 

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “American Scholar”

Selections from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself

Selections from Emily Dickinson’s poetry

Henry David Thoreau’s memoir, Walden (1854)

Herman Melville’s novella, Benito Cereno (1852)

Harriet Jacobs’ autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

Selections from Sui Sin Far’s works

Elizabeth Jordan, editor, The Sturdy Oak

Ava Chin, Mott Street: The Story of Belonging: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming

Elizabeth Graver, Kantika 

ENGL 561A-001 - Science and Technology Studies - Suzy Anger

Term 2 
MON, 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM 

Nineteenth-Century Literature and Technology 

Technologies emerged in the nineteenth century that transformed conceptions of time, space, and the self, and influenced the form and content of literary texts. Trains, and later automobiles, allowed for rapid travel; electricity illuminated cities, altering perceptions of the relations between night and day; the telegraph enabled instantaneous, seemingly incorporeal, communication across distances; sound recording and wireless delivered disembodied voices. Environmental movements grew up in response to industrial technologies. New technologies were also crucial tools of imperialism and globalization, and of resistance to them.

In this seminar, we will consider the ways in which emerging technologies of communication, recording, perception, transportation, industry, medicine, and war altered nineteenth-century literature and culture. Topics discussed will include technology and consciousness, technology and perception, globalization and imperialism, technology and race, industrialism and the environment, the emerging genre of science fiction, automata, technology and the supernatural (spiritual telegraphy, ghost photography), and technologies and disability.

Authors and texts will include Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, George Eliot, Flora Anna Steel, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, and H. G. Wells, along with critical readings from Marian Aguiar, Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility; Long T. Bui, Model Machines; Louis Chude-Sokei, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics; and Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media; and M. Norton Wise, “The Gender of Automata in Victorian England.”

ENGL 565A-001 - Studies in Environmental Humanities - Alexander Dick

Term 1 
MON, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM 

Vancouver's Coasts 

Greater Vancouver is located at the estuarial meeting point of one of North America’s largest and most complex riverine watersheds, an oceanic basin (a sea, a straight, an inlet), a mountain range, and an archipelago. The complexities of this coastal ecology continually dog, confront, and challenge its image as Canada’s transcendental, gleaming, futuristic city of glass. Vancouver was also built on the unceded territory of three coastal nations and it shares a history of migrations and dispossessions with several continents to which it is still connected by ties of commerce, culture, and conflict. What does it mean to live, work, play, and thrive in such a place? This course will offer an interdisciplinary, multi-generic, and multi-media survey of writing from and about Vancouver’s coasts, their ecologies, and their colonialisms. The literary component of the course will feature poetry and stories by E. Pauline Johnson, Daphne Marlatt, Phinder Dulai, Rita Wong, Wayde Compton, and Lee Maracle, accompanied by selected readings from the field of coastal studies including the many philosophical, historical, aesthetic, and environmental approaches scholars bring to it. For some of our class meetings—and time permitting—the class will visit coastal sites described and discussed in our readings, such as Wreck Beach, Vancouver Harbour, Stanley Park, Kits Point (Senakw), and Steveston. Assignments will combine creative and critical skills and will include both a field report on a coastal Vancouver site and a final conference-length paper.

 

 

2026 Summer

NOTE: Schedule subject to change
As of January 20, 2026
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ENGL 546A-001 - Studies in Commonwealth/Postcolonial Literatures - Tolulope Akinwole

Postcolonial Auto/Mobility 

Term 1 
TUE & THU, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM 

Since the scholarship on automobility emerged in the field of sociology, its key claims have paid keen attention to the infrastructural networks in which the automobile is embedded. However, sociological examinations have in the same vein given short shrift to the postcolonial. This seminar takes this limitation of the sociological debate on automobility as a point of departure for reading postcolonial automobility in literary and cultural texts. In this course, we will commence from two central claims: the first, the entire world as we know it is postcolonial; and the second, the term “automobility” is a misnomer for what it purports to name. We will start by exploring automobility as a form that we can read across spaces—from Vancouver to New York to Jakarta to Lagos. In doing so, we will consider the term postcolonial and ask ourselves what it means to think of our world as we know it as postcolonial and of ourselves as postcolonial subjects. We shall apply our answers to these questions to rigorous discussions of instances of the automobile in postcolonial texts, with particular attention to Africa. Africa is particularly cogent for this reading because it challenges any simplistic understanding of automobility. Through novels, plays, poetry, and films, we will consider Africa’s automobile network of road, spatiality, coloniality, infrastructure, motor vehicle, and oil and the corollary effects of all this on the artistic imaginations of African cultural producers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In short, this course considers the keyword “automobility” as an entry point to unpacking the connections between literature and infrastructure.

ENGL 535A-001 - Literatures of the Nineteenth Century - Miranda Burgess

Term 2 
WED & FRI, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM 

The material book: history and networks, 1780s-1890s 

This seminar places the material book in the context of its networks of raw materials, with a focus on linen, lead, trees, insects, leather, and bone and their entanglement with histories of emerging capitalism and financial exchange, maritime, riparian, and overland transport, chattel slavery and the traffic in enslaved people, "exploration," extraction, and settlement. Discussions will emphasize the English-language codex of Britain and America and the more expansively defined and/or non-codex books of Nuu-chah-nulth, Lakota, Haudenosaunee, and Cherokee nations/peoples. Assignments will be sequenced, including a theory or history presentation and handout, a research abstract, and an annotated bibliography, building toward the design and completion of individual projects investigating and contextualizing in historical and spatial relations the materials and making of a book (codex or otherwise) or related grouping of books of each student's choice. There will be opportunities for hands-on work with materials in Rare Books and Special Collections and the Museum of Anthropology. There will also be opportunities to gain practical experience in making the material book (binding, ink- and paper-making, letterpress) if seminar members desire.

Readings will include Senchyne, The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Univ of Massachusetts Press, 2020); Barnes and Goodman, American Contact: Objects of Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History (Univ of Pennsylvania Press, 2024); Skeehan, Fabric of Empire: Material and Literary Cultures of the Global Atlantic (Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2020); Wisecup, Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures (Yale Univ Press, 2021) and "Toward a Bibliography of Birch Bark," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 117, no 4 (2023); Duffek, McLennan, and Wilson, Where the Power is: Indigenous Perspectives on Northwest Coast Art (Museum of Anthropology/Figure One, 2021); Marie Battiste, "Print Culture and Decolonizing the University," in Decolonizing the Page (Univ of Toronto Press, 2004); shorter works on specific materials and networks. Historical texts will include James Cook, Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (London, 1784); Olaudah Equiano, Interesting Narrative of the Life (1789); Anna Barbauld, Evenings at Home (1792-96); William Wordsworth, The 1805 Prelude (selected books); Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814); Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897); Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987); Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust (1991); others TBA.

 

 

Canadian Literatures in English: Texts and Contexts

Cynthia Sugars and Laura Moss
Ontario: Broadview Press
2025

Canadian Literatures in English, Texts and Contexts reflects the editors’ commitment to historical contextualization, cultural inclusion, and a nuanced understanding of critical debates over the long literary history of what is now Canada. The second edition has been updated throughout to include recent scholarship and fresh literary works. New to the second edition are works by André Alexis, Joy Kogawa, Leeanne Betasamosake Simpson, Derek Beaulieu, Billy-Ray Belcourt, and many others.

 

 

 

 

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About the Editors

Laura Moss and Cynthia Sugars

Cynthia Sugars is Professor of English and Canadian Literatures at the University of Ottawa. Laura Moss is Professor of English at UBC where she teaches Canadian and postcolonial literatures, particularly those of Africa.

Learn more about Laura Moss

Brutal Fantasies

Christine Kim
Durham: Duke University Press
2025

In Brutal Fantasies, Christine Kim examines how Western cultural representations of North Korea depend on fantasies of the inhuman. Drawing on films, fiction, and defectors’ life writings from the last two decades, Kim analyzes how these representations construct North Korea as a site of brutality and inhumanity. She recasts these stories through Asian American and global Asian frameworks that move beyond common Cold War binaries to critique how US imperialism persists in global understandings of North Korea. Kim shows how human rights discourses simultaneously instrumentalize and dehumanize North Korea while demonstrating that North Korea is a site of contradiction that complicates Western interpretive constraints. She also explores the Korean diaspora’s complex relationship with North Korea and highlights the vulnerability and marginalization of diasporic subjects. In so doing, Kim pulls back the veil on prevailing cultural myths enshrouding North Korea, offering alternative ways of understanding its role in global and regional imaginaries.

 

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About the Author

Christine Kim

Christine Kim is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures and a faculty affiliate of UBC’s Asian Canadian Studies and Asian Migration program (ACAM). She was the editor-in-chief of the journal Canadian Literature (2020-25). Before joining UBC in 2020, she taught at Simon Fraser University where she was a founding co-director of Simon Fraser University’s Institute of Transpacific Cultural Research. Her research and teaching interests lie in Asian diaspora, the Cold War, imperialism, and race.

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Facsimile: Making, Likeness, and Medieval Manuscripts

Siân Echard
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press
2025

Facsimiles are, or claim to be, exact copies of objects, and medieval manuscripts have long been a focus for this kind of reproduction. Today, digitization delivers complete, high-resolution, full-color digital copies of thousands of medieval manuscripts to anyone with an internet connection. But for centuries, scholars in fields like art history, or paleography, or textual editing had to travel to see the manuscripts their work depended on. When they couldn’t, they relied on copies—drawings, engravings, lithographs, and eventually monochrome photographs, usually of parts of a manuscript rather than the whole thing.

Facsimile explores the prehistory of our digital present, focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a period that witnessed rapid technological change; a renewal of interest in the Middle Ages in the public at large; the consolidation and emergence of scholarly disciplines; and the increase in institutions that cared for medieval manuscripts. Siân Echard shows how facsimiles of medieval manuscripts were central to all these developments. Focusing on Britain, Echard traces how predigital technologies of reproduction were viewed by their practitioners and consumers, and how they helped to form the ways people related to the medieval past. Facsimile users were scholarly and popular, with interests in text, or image, or books, or all these things at once. Four chapters—Letter, Figure, Color, Catastrophe—show how the human hand, the human eye, and the human imagination intertwined with technology, creating modern-medieval hybrids that sit at the intersection of past and present.

From the rise of paleography and diplomatics as disciplines to the emergence of calligraphy as a craft and hobby, from the use of facsimiles in shaping narratives of national identity to the substitution of facsimiles for destroyed or damaged manuscripts in the development of preservation practices, Facsimile offers an unprecedented cultural history of reproductions of medieval manuscripts.

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About the Author

Siân Echard

Siân Echard is Professor of English and Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia.

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Radio Free Stein

Radio Free Stein

Adam Frank

Illinois: Northwestern University Press
2024

What happens when we listen to Gertrude Stein’s plays as radio and music theater? This book explores the sound of Stein’s theater and proposes that radio, when approached both historically and phenomenologically, offers technical solutions to her texts’ unique challenges. Adam J. Frank documents the collaborative project of staging Stein’s early plays and offers new critical interpretations of these lesser-known works. Radio Free Stein grapples with her innovative theater poetics from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: sound and media studies, affect and object relations theory, linguistic performativity, theater scholarship, and music composition.

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About the Author

Adam Frank

Adam Frank is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures. His books include Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol and, coauthored with Elizabeth Wilson, A Silvan Tomkins Handbook. He is the creator and producer of the Radio Free Stein critical sound project, available at radiofreestein.com

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Stolen Plums

Alice Turski
Montreal: Vehicule Press
2025

The poems in Alice Turski’s ravenous and playful Stolen Plums explore the ways we consume and are consumed by those we love and the histories they embody. Poignantly navigating uncertainties of self, country, and family, Turski contemplates the precarities of immigration, belonging, matrilineage, and marriage in unsparing language that straddles the border between ode and elegy.  She captures not only a world “ready to eat whatever / you can bear abandoning,” but also the desire animating “tines of light that make [a] tense face beautiful.” Stolen Plums is a singular and singularly voracious debut.

 

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About the Author

Alice Turski

Alice Turski is a PhD candidate in the UBC Department of English Language and Literatures. Before coming to UBC, Alice received her MFA from Cornell University, where she also taught as a Teaching Fellow.

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Proximities: Literature, Mobility and the Politics of Displacement

John Culbert
Liverpool: U of Liverpool Press
2025

As the era of high globalization has given way to a time of resurgent nationalisms, the discourse of travel has undergone significant change. The previous era’s keywords of freedom, mobility and connection increasingly vie with a language of borders, security and national identity. In this study of the politics of modern travel and migration, John Culbert shows how today’s contradictions of global mobility are an abiding feature of modernity and an outgrowth of coloniality as an ongoing practice of land theft, displacement and dispossession.

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About the Author

John Culbert

John Culbert teaches in the UBC Department of English Language & Literatures and is a member of the UBC Centre for Migration Studies.

 

Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance

Vin Nardizzi
Toronto: University of Toronto Press
2025

John Gerard’s natural history of plants, The Herball (1597), is considered a failure in the history of science. Despite this reputation, it has endured as an aesthetic resource. Its illustrations were used as needlework patterns, and strewn across its pages are extracts of classical poetry, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, that delight and instruct. It is little wonder that early modern poets, like Shakespeare and Milton, gathered inspiration from this storehouse of plants.

In Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance, Vin Nardizzi offers a reparative reading of Gerard’s “failed” text, particularly its chapters on leeks, laurels, tulips, and potatoes. Through a series of experiments in speculative natural history, which require an analysis of both word and image, Nardizzi distills The Herball’s logic and poetics, its distinctions and infelicities, and demonstrates the entanglements of humans and plants at the core of Shakespeare’s plays. Exploring these “cross-kingdom” encounters, Nardizzi contributes to the burgeoning field of queer ecologies by treating plant natural history as a serious intellectual resource for writing a counter-history of embodiment at the turn of the seventeenth century. All we need do, Nardizzi proposes, is smell the flowers.

A multidisciplinary study of the art and science of botany in Shakespeare’s time, Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance excavates plant natural history as a vital resource for reimagining categories of embodiment, including gender and sex.

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About the Author

Vin Nardizzi

Photo of EL&L faculty member Dr. Vin Nardizzi

Vin Nardizzi is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He specializes in English Renaissance literature and Shakespeare. He also has research interests in ecotheory, plant studies, queer studies, and disability studies.

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2025 Summer Undergraduate Courses

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Literature Course Groups

A. Medieval and Renaissance literatures: ENGL 343 to ENGL 350

B. 18th- and 19th-century literatures: ENGL 351 to ENGL 364

C. Modern, contemporary, transnational, and Indigenous literatures: ENGL 365 to ENGL 379

D. Media, theory, genre, and special topic:  ENGL 332 to ENGL 339; ENGL 380 to ENGL 397

Language Course Groups

A. Structure of English: ENGL 330, 331, 321

B. History of English: ENGL 318, 319, 342, 343, 344, 346

C. Approaches to contemporary English: ENGL 323, 324, 328

D. Discourse and meaning: ENGL 312, 322, 327

E. Rhetoric: ENGL 307-311

Note: topics covered in any of the above groups may also focus on ENGL 326 (which has no permanent title) and ENGL 489 (majors seminar-language, where the instructor decides on the topic offered in any given year).

Each course will be classed into one of the groups A-E in any given year, depending on the topic covered. Please see an advisor if you want ENGL 326 or ENGL 489 to count as satisfying group A-E requirements.

As of June 15, 2025

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ENGL 110-MA1 - Approaches to Literature and Culture - Innis, Scott

TERM 1
MW, 12:00PM - 3:00PM

Irony and Serious Humour in Multicultural Writing and Film

As cultural and literary devices, irony and humour are similar in that they often involve language or forms of expression that appear to mean something other than what they say. This surprising lack of commitment to meaning is part of what makes irony and humour funny—and thus unserious by definition. It’s only a joke, after all. Yet ironic double meaning and comic incongruity are also highly effective when it comes to raising difficult issues or potentially distressing and embarrassing subject matter. Ironically, it is the unseriousness of humour that seems most to recommend it as a literary and cultural technique for addressing serious issues.

This course proposes to take a serious look at how different forms of irony and humour operate in the creative work of a number of (mostly) contemporary Indigenous, Black, and multicultural authors. It inquires into how these authors use ironic and comic modes of address and representation to elude and transgress dominant social norms around class, gender, race, sexuality, and identity. Who or what is the “butt” or object of humour in the work of these short story writers, poets, and film makers? Are their jokes and ironic characterizations primarily instances of “laughing at,” or do they also invite readers to consolidate group identity and fellow feeling by means of “laughing with?” Do the texts use comic ambiguity and irony to “bribe” readers with feelings of comic enjoyment, or is the goal rather to generate ridicule, scorn, and displeasure. Most importantly, are there instances in which these authors use humour to perform more overtly serious work, such as political resistance, opposition, and critique?

The course syllabus is to comprise work by some or all of the following authors, poets, and directors: Sherman Alexie (Spokane), Marie Annharte Baker (Anishinaabe), Wanda Coleman, Linh Dinh, Chester Himes, Thomas King (Cherokee), Ha Jin, Spike Lee, Adrian Louis (Lovelock Paiute), K. Silem Mohammad, Trevor Noah, and John Yau. Many of the texts are quite short, and we are watching at least one film (in lieu of reading a novel).

 

ENGL 110-MA2 - Approaches to Literature and Culture - Sharpe, Jae

TERM 1
TTh, 12:00PM - 3:00PM

We will post the course description as it becomes available.

ENGL 110-JL1 - Approaches to Literature and Culture - Roukema, Aren

TERM 2
MW, 12:00PM - 3:00PM

Narrating Realities

What does it mean to “represent” a real-world fact, experience, or belief in fiction? What happens to that “real” thing once it becomes part of a story? Why do we use stories — instead of more clearly factual modes of communication — to process and communicate our perceptions and experiences of reality? What are the signals we use to differentiate fact from fiction in the first place? If we accept that the lines between story and reality are blurry, how can fiction be used to propose alternative realities, or challenge the “truths” and perceptions of this one?

This course will analyze themes of fictional reality in texts from authors including Jorge Luis Borges, Lana and Lilly Wachowski, and Tim O’Brien. We will particularly focus on texts by racially marginalized authors in North America, including Eden Robinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, who have used fiction as a space in which to challenge the realities asserted by colonizer knowledge and stories. We will encounter texts in various formal genres — a novel, short fiction, poetry, a film — and ask how approaches to narrating reality mark the differences between these genres.

Texts will include Robinson's Monkey Beach (Vintage, 2000), O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), the Wachowskis’ first Matrix film (1999), and various poems and short stories.

ENGL 110-JL2 - Approaches to Literature and Culture - Baxter, Gisele

TERM 2
TTh, 12:00PM - 3:00PM

Literary Monsters and Monstrous Literature

Rey: “You are a monster.”
Kylo Ren: “Yes, I am.”
– Star Wars: The Last Jedi

“Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time into this breathing world” – Richard III 1.i

What is a monster? We know monsters from myths and legends, folktales, horror fiction and film. We know their variety: the grotesque, the beautiful, the terrifying, the pitiable, the sports of nature and the forces of evil. Dragons, werewolves, vampires, zombies, Frankenstein’s Creature, Dorian Gray, the Joker, Hannibal Lecter, Marisa Coulter, many of the characters in The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones: they’re everywhere, from under the bed to the house next door to the battlefield, and right into a great deal of literature. Which leaves us here: in this section of 110 we’ll focus on how literary texts \use representations of monstrosity in ways that inspire both terror and horror, as well as (let’s be honest) fascination and even enjoyment.

We’ll start with William Shakespeare’s Richard III (a play that meditates on villainy and ambition in demonizing its subject for Tudor audiences, yet still fascinates contemporary ones) and at Ian McKellen’s 1995 film adaptation, which shifts the setting to an alternate-reality 1930s England where fascism takes hold. We will also consider various stage and screen adaptations as approaches to the play, including recent ones using race and gender-diverse casting, and sometimes featuring as Richard actors who are themselves physically disabled or disfigured. Other core texts include Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. There may be a couple of additional texts.

Your writing assignments in this course (two essays and a final exam) will develop skills in both critical thinking and university-level literary textual analysis, and both are much more generally useful and applicable than you might think. I hope there will also be a lot of lively discussion, both in class and on our Canvas site.

ENGL243-921 - Speculative Fiction - Rouse, Robert

TERM 1
MW 10:00AM - 1:00PM

Robots, Artificial Intelligence, and Us.

AI is one of the most pressing technological and social questions of the current moment. Governments and corporations around the world are rushing to pour billions of dollars into AI research, all seeking to be the first to develop AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and to leverage other modes of AI (LLMs and the like). The social questions surrounding AI are numerous and pressing, yet they are not new. Writers have been exploring the potential impacts of AI on human society, and on human psychology, for many decades.

In this course we will explore the complex intimate relationships between humans and artificial intelligences through a range of literary texts from the 20th and 21st centuries. We will delve (a common LLM word) into a selection of seminal works that span various genres and perspectives, providing insights into the implications of our technological advancements on society, ethics, and identity.

The course texts will include the following: I, Robot; Neuromancer; The Lifecycle of Software Objects; The Murderbot Diaries, vol 1 (the two novellas All Systems Red and Artificial Condition); and Klara and the Sun; and a selection of films on AI.

ENGL 330-98A -The Structure of Modern English: Sounds and Words - de Villiers, Jessica

ONLINE

This online course explores and examines contemporary English phonology, morphology, parts of speech, and lexical (word) meaning. We begin with the study of distinct speech sounds and possible sound combinations in English. Students will study the International Phonetic Alphabet as it applies to current varieties of English. Next, we study the processes of word formation and word classification in English. We then study word meaning (lexical semantics) using a variety of approaches. The course is offered from a descriptive perspective and is not focused exclusively on any specific linguistic theory. There are three collaborative assignments, five quizzes, graded discussions for each module and a final exam.

Students will be working fully online on all the course work. There are Zoom meetings and recorded lectures at regular intervals. The final exam is online. Zoom office hours are by appointment.

Required reading:

Brinton, Laurel J. and Donna M. Brinton. The Linguistic Structure of Modern English. John Benjamins, 2010. ISBN 978 90 272 1172 9.

More details are available on the course website on canvas.ubc.ca.

ENGL 348A-98A - Shakespeare - Paul, Gavin

ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS

"Author's pen" and "actor's voice": Shakespeare in Text and Performance

This course will explore the extent to which we as readers of Shakespeare’s tragedies, histories, and comedies can remain engaged with his plays’ potential for realization onstage, in performance.  Part of our focus will be historicist: we will consider the institutional and social conditions attendant upon the original productions of the plays, as well as the ways in which the plays themselves dramatize matters of affect and spectatorship. Our work will also explore the formal dramaturgy of the plays in order to think about how the texts register the nuance of performance in obvious ways (in stage directions and dialogue) and by appealing to the senses and to the emotions of a live audience. We will also look at the editing, printing, and publishing of the plays in order to think about how the page simultaneously encodes and distorts performance for modern readers. Whenever possible, we will consider the performance history of the plays, with a particular emphasis on how modern adaptations for the stage make use of (cut, modify, rearrange, reimagine) the playtext.

362A-921 - Victorian Period Literature - Baxter, Gisele

TERM 1
TTh, 2:00PM - 5:00PM

Ghosts are Real (So are Vampires): Victorian Gothic Terror, Horror, and the Supernatural

“Ghosts are real, this much I know” – Edith Cushing, Crimson Peak

“There are such beings as vampires; some of us have evidence that they exist” – Abraham Van Helsing, Dracula

Whether we take Edith Cushing or Abraham Van Helsing at their word, the 19th-century Gothic revival certainly emphasized possibilities for terror and horror in tales of the supernatural. However, these interventions of spectral and un-dead beings often take place in the recognizable present; they speak to its anxieties. Perhaps they speak to ours as well, given our recent fascination with Neo-Victorian representations of the 19th century, such as Crimson Peak, as well as Penny Dreadful, From Hell, Sarah Waters’s Victorian trilogy, the numerous adaptations of Dracula (such as the recent third Nosferatu), plus many others.

We will examine fiction addressing issues of gender and sexuality; class, race, and culture; realism and the supernatural; urban and rural settings, all in a century known for developments in science and technology (especially photography), social upheaval, and a veneer of respectability, yet with monsters lurking in closets and under beds. Our focus will also permit consideration of the boom in publication of popular literature in a variety of formats, as well as the rise of the professional writer during the 19th century.

Core texts include Margaret Oliphant’s The Library Window, Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and selected short fiction possibly including M.R. James, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”; Elizabeth Gaskell, “The Old Nurse’s Story”; Sheridan LeFanu, “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street”; Mary Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne,” R.L. Stevenson, “The Body Snatcher”; E. Nesbit, “John Charrington’s Wedding” and maybe a couple of Victorian werewolf stories (since werewolf stories feature prominently in the research done for both Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s infamous Dracula). Evaluation will be based on a midterm essay, a term paper, a final reflection essay, and participation in discussion both in class and on the course’s Canvas site.

 

ENGL 392-98A -Children's Literature - Bose, Sarika

ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS

“Down the Rabbit Hole”: Child, Nation and British Fantasy Literature 

Children’s books—encountered in the earliest stages of children’s development—can have a lasting influence on children’s views of their world and themselves. English 392 investigates how narratives of national identity in the folklore and myth-narratives are deployed in fantasy texts written for children in England. Some of our texts will come from Canadian Indigenous traditions to provide a comparison with classic texts from England. Texts will include fairy tales, The Hobbit, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, “Coyote Columbus”, and The Graveyard Book. These will be examined through a broad range of critical perspectives which are literary, socio-political and historical. The pictures of nation constructed in children’s books represent particular national myths and culturally-informed identities. We will look at the ways both “classic” and less traditionally canonical children’s texts create intertextual narratives that expand, resist, subvert and adapt each other’s work. This fully asynchronous 13-week course runs from May to August, with writing assignments and weekly discussion posts. The final examination, set in August, is the only synchronous component, and will be invigilated through Zoom. This course is part of the English Minor program in the Department of English Language and Literatures, but is open to English majors and to students in other programs.

We will post the course description as it becomes available.

ENGL 397A-951 - Studies in Prose Fiction - James, Suzanne

TERM 2
TTh, 12:00PM - 3:00PM

“And the winner is . . .!”: Canada’s Literary Prize Culture

“In short, prizes matter. . .With only an appearance on . . . [a] shortlist, a book moves from total obscurity in the classroom and pages of literary criticism to respectable showings in both—and it gets a healthy popularity boost along the way.” --Alexander Manshel, Laura B. McGrath and  J.D. Porter

In this class, we will discuss five fictional works which won Canadian literary prizes in 2024: Anne Michael’s Held (Giller Prize), Jordan Abel’s Empty Spaces (Governor General’s Award for Fiction), Sheung-King’s Batshit Seven (Atwood-Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize), Catherine Leroux’s The Future (Canada Reads) and Darrel J. McLeod’s A Season in Chezgh’un (Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize). We will consider the institutional components of these prizes (evaluation criteria, selection of judges, procedures for submission and selection, history, past recipients) as well as what Manshel, McGrath & Porter refer to as the “consecrating forces and actors” which influence literary awards. In addition to writing a critical essay on one of the texts, students will participate as a jury member in an in-house “Fiction 2024” award committee to choose our own winner.

If you’re interested in truly contemporary fiction, the exigencies of literary prizes, evaluating fiction, and current directions in Canadian literature, then this is the course for you!

ENGL 490-921 - Literature Majors Seminar - Te Punga Somerville, Alice

CROSS-LISTED WITH ENGL 491A-921
TERM 1
MW, 12:00PM - 3:00PM

Reading Indigenous Texts

How do we read Indigenous texts? How can reading help us think about what it means to be Indigenous – here, there, anywhere? What are the connections between writing, museums and universities? How can we think about the global, and about specificity, by engaging with Indigenous texts? Why read Indigenous texts in this present moment?

In this course, we will ask these questions by turning to recent collections of poetry by two very different Indigenous writers, Jenny Davis (Chickasaw) and Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner (Marshallese), as well as short creative and critical texts by other writers; we will also ask them by connecting with some Indigenous ‘texts’ at the Museum of Anthropology on campus.

Students will have the opportunity to read texts of your choosing that connect our class discussions and readings with your own communities and networks. Evaluation will include short and long writing and research tasks, a reading log, and a short presentation.

ENGL 491A-921 - Honours Seminar - Te Punga Somerville, Alice

CROSS-LISTED WITH ENGL 490-921
TERM 1
MW, 12:00PM - 3:00PM

Reading Indigenous Texts

How do we read Indigenous texts? How can reading help us think about what it means to be Indigenous – here, there, anywhere? What are the connections between writing, museums and universities? How can we think about the global, and about specificity, by engaging with Indigenous texts? Why read Indigenous texts in this present moment?

In this course, we will ask these questions by turning to recent collections of poetry by two very different Indigenous writers, Jenny Davis (Chickasaw) and Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner (Marshallese), as well as short creative and critical texts by other writers; we will also ask them by connecting with some Indigenous ‘texts’ at the Museum of Anthropology on campus.

Students will have the opportunity to read texts of your choosing that connect our class discussions and readings with your own communities and networks. Evaluation will include short and long writing and research tasks, a reading log, and a short presentation.