Graduate Program

Wes hal! England prior to the Norman Conquest in 1066 c.e,  produced King Alfred, Beowulf and stunning poetry and prose, written at a time when “Anglo-Saxon” England fought for its cultural and political status in the British Isles. We’ll explore the sublime, mystical, medical, and earthy writings of England: Wonders of the East, comets, portents, medicinal charms, riddles, the Paternoster and the Devil, maps, visions, wolves, women, runes, cross-dressing saints. We’ll read some in the original Old English and some in translation, and as your lareow (teaching-slave) I’ll help you sharpen your knowledge of OE grammar and vocabulary, and explore the diversity of a people who’ve been reduced to stereotype and debasement. Old English stood with Old Irish as being one of the earliest producers in western Europe of a people’s native language on manuscript. England survived invasions by the Danes and the Normans (1066) which never completely replaced its language with Danish or French, merely change it.  

Location

Hylan Building Room 305 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is perhaps the most poetically sophisticated, bawdy, funny, and cynical  portrait of pre-Modern society in the English canon. This course is a portal into Chaucer's world: language, class pretensions, gender non-conformism, political cataclysms. Reading the Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English – easy and fun to learn – the class explores both the tales themselves and some of their contemporary reimaginings.  

Location

Hylan Building Room 305 (TR 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

The second of a sequence of two, the course approaches 'The Divine Comedy' both as a poetic masterpiece and as an encyclopedia of medieval culture. Through a close textual analysis of the second half of 'Purgatorio' and the entirety of 'Paradiso,' students learn how to approach Dante's poetry as a vehicle for thought, an instrument of self-discovery, and a way to understand and affect the historical reality. They also gain a perspective on the Biblical, Christian, and Classical traditions as they intersect with the multiple levels of Dante's concern, ranging from literature to history, from politics to government, from philosophy to theology. A visual component, including illustrations of the 'Comedy' and multiple artworks pertinent to the narrative, complements the course. Class format includes lectures, discussion, and a weekly recitation session. Intensive class participation is encouraged. No prerequisites. Freshmen are welcome. Part of the Dante Humanities Cluster.

Location

Morey Room 501 (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

This course on tragedy has three parts. The first concentrates on ancient Greek tragedy (Aeschylus, Sophocles). The second considers the revival of tragedy in early modern England both as a prestigious neoclassical form and as a vehicle for domestic themes traditionally associated with comedy (Marlowe, Shakespeare, Dryden). The third takes up the disappearance--or transformation--of tragedy in more recent times (Beckett, Lorca). In addition to primary texts, we will examine a number of important theories of tragedy (Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, Weil, Benjamin, Arendt). Our readings will be guided by such questions as: what might the story of this genre tell us about the longer history of representation? And how does tragedy illuminate basic problems such as the appeal of violence and vengeance, the role of religion in society, and the difficulty of finding an ethics that works for all people?

Location

Lechase Room 104 (MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

This course focuses on literature and medicine in the 16th and 17th centuries. It introduces students to the major medical systems of the era and explores the ways that medical theories and practices both influenced and incorporated literary representations. We will consider character, inspiration, gender, race, and erotic love, among other topics. Authors may include William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Robert Burton, Thomas Browne, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Finch, Lady Montague, and members of the Royal Society. 

Location

Meliora Room 219 (MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM)

Forty years after his death in 1984, Michel Foucault continues to be considered one of the world’s most prominent and influential thinkers across a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, literary studies, art history, cultural studies, sociology, cultural anthropology, gender studies, history, musicology, and visual/film studies. We will examine Foucault’s major works, such as Madness and Civilization, The Order of Things, and Discipline and Punish, the interviews and essays of Power/Knowledge, as well as selections from the recently published Collège de France lectures, to understand his profound effect on the ethical and political transformations of “Theory” or “Critical Theory.” We will also examine Foucault’s thought in relation to prominent philosophers and critics, including Judith Butler, Derrida, Rorty, Habermas, and Hayden White. Conducted in English.

Location

Lattimore Room 401 (TR 6:15PM - 7:30PM)

The life of John Keats is the stuff of romantic legend. The son of a London innkeeper and initially trained as a doctor, Keats would go on to write some of the most memorable poems of the English language before his death from tuberculosis at the age of 25 in Italy, far from the love of his life Fanny Brawne. In this course we will read a variety of Keats’s poems and letters, paying attention to how he overcame the prejudices against his social class and developed the stylistic traits for which he is now famous—lush imagery, sensuous verbal music, intense emotion, and imaginative vision. Despite his brief life, Keats’s poems have exerted a lasting influence. This course traces Keats’s influence on two major poets of the Victorian and Modernist eras—Gerard Manley Hopkins and William Butler Yeats. Hopkins, a Jesuit priest who wrote moving poems about nature in an era of industrialism and struggled with his religious faith and homoerotic desires, would seem to have little in common with the Irish poet Yeats, who explored everything from Gaelic myths and revolutionary politics to the occult. This course explores how, despite their many differences, both Hopkins and Yeats were inspired by the work of Keats, who provided a model for their literary experiments and for the poet as visionary. No prerequisites or prior knowledge of poetry required for this class. Fulfills the post-1800 requirement. No prerequisites. Counts towards the following clusters: Great Books, Great Authors (H1ENG010) and Poems, Poetry, and Poetics (H1ENG012).

Location

Lechase Room 104 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

In recent years, we have seen a virtual explosion of writing by women, with women’s novels constituting some of the most widely read and critically admired work being produced today. The global reach of both its authors and audiences has made contemporary women’s writing a truly international phenomenon. We will examine what makes this work especially innovative: its experimentation with new voices and narrative forms and its blurring of genre boundaries. We will look at the dialogue it has established with the past, where it often finds its inspiration, self-consciously appropriating earlier literary texts or rewriting history.  We will also consider what special challenges this work poses for its readers. Looking at works originating in a wide range of locations, this course, will explore the diverse shapes of contemporary women's imagination and attempt to account for the compelling interest of this new body of fiction.

Location

Bausch & Lomb Room 270 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

Moving images recorded on analog film defined the 20th century in an unprecedented way. This course considers the tangible object that is the source of the image onscreen, and the social, cultural, and historical value of a reel of film as an organic element with a finite life cycle. We focus on the analog photographic element and its origins (both theatrical and small gauge), the basics of photochemical film technology, and the state of film conservation and preservation worldwide. Guest lectures by staff of the Moving Image Department of George Eastman Museum provide a first-hand look at film preservation in action, allowing us to consider analog film as an ephemeral form of material culture: a multipurpose, visual record that is art, entertainment, evidentiary document, and historical artifact. Weekly film assignments. Class meets on River Campus and at George Eastman Museum (900 East Ave, no admission fee; STUDENTS PROVIDE THEIR OWN TRANSPORTATION FOR CLASSES OFF CAMPUS). No audits, no pre-requisites. Enrollment limited by hands-on nature of course and meeting space capacity.

Location

Wegmans Room 1009 (R 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course examines the philosophical, aesthetic, and social issues that are central to classical film theory. It traces the historical development of film theory from 1900 to the 1950s. We will begin with on thinkers in the period of early cinema, including Germaine Dulac, Jean and Marie Epstein, and then we will examine the development of film theory in the work of later theorists, such as Jean Mitry, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Andre Bazin and Christian Metz. Weekly screenings of historically contemporary films will allow us to examine the ongoing dialogue between the evolving medium and the developing theoretical discussion.

Location

Morey Room 504 (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

This course explores three of Italy’s most prominent post-WWII directors, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Liliana Cavani, who developed distinct cinemas and contributed radical representations to key cultural debates. Students will examine each filmmaker’s specific thematic and stylistic innovations, such as Fellini’s carnivalesque and dreamlike states, Antonioni’s use of space and color, and Cavani’s marginal figures and use of flashback. Students will also compare how their works address three of postwar Italy’s and the West’s most critical questions: modernization, the 1968 student protests and the legacy of Fascism. Films include: Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Amarcord; Antonioni’s Red Desert and Zabriskie Point; and Cavani’s The Cannibals and The Night Porter. Assignments include: historical, biographical and critical readings, film screenings, short papers and a final essay. Readings will be in English and films will be shown with English subtitles.

Location

Lechase Room 160 (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

This course introduces students to the methods involved in turning real objects into virtual ones using cutting edge digital imaging technology and image rendering techniques. Focusing on manuscripts, paintings, maps, and 3D artifacts, students will learn the basics of multispectral imaging, photogrammetry, and Reflectance Transformation Imaging, and spectral image processing using ENVI and Photoshop. These skills will be applied to data from the ongoing research of the Lazarus Project as well as to local cultural heritage collections.

Location

Hylan Building Room 303 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

Restricted to Selznick Students

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Restricted to Selznick Students

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Restricted to Selznick Students

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

is a study-abroad course based in Florence, Italy, and dedicated to the intensive study of Creative Writing. It will run from May 12 – May 31, 2025. Both interdisciplinary and international, this course will offer students the opportunity to work on their writing projects in one of the most culturally significant cities in the world. The course will combine group workshops, tutorial meetings, and walking tours through Florence and the surrounding countryside. Students will complete a portfolio in their preferred genre: fiction, creative nonfiction, playwriting, or literary translation. The course is open to University of Rochester students and can be taken as an elective. It will fulfill a 200-level requirement in the Creative Writing major, minor, or cluster. The program fee is $3,800. For further questions please contact Professor Joanna Scott.  

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

This class is an intensive fiction workshop for students who have completed ENGL 121 or have permission from the instructor. Students will write three complete short stories; submit those stories to group critique; read challenging short fiction by established writers like Lydia Davis, Diane Williams, Yasunari Kawabata, and others; and take part in thorough, critical group discussion. Readings will emphasize experimental and unconventional writing styles. We will discuss the effects of perspective, time, sound, visual detail, mood, and story shape, and other fine-grained elements of craft.

Location

Goergen Hall Room 110 (R 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

Poems, as William Carlos Williams once said, are machines made out of words, and in this advanced poetry workshop we will work on making the most gorgeous, gripping, and efficient machines possible. To that end, we will read both one another's poems and poems by established authors, in either case paying attention to the ways in which the authors harness aspects of their medium, the English language: syntax, diction, rhythm. The poems we write may take any shape, any form, but we will work towards understanding why a particular poem must take the shape it has; we will pay attention not so much to what the poems say as to how they say it. Requirements: weekly writing and reading assignments, revisions of assignments, devoted participation in class discussions, a final project.
Permission of instructor is required. Students are to submit 3-5 typed poems to cwessels@ur.rochester.edu in order to apply.

Location

Genesee Hall Room 309 (T 4:50PM - 7:30PM)

This course examines four science fiction writers—Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. Le Guin, Stanislaw Lem, and Michel Faber—who address the perilous issues of voyage into foreign terrain, calling upon post-colonial criticism to guide us. Clarke's novels Rendezvous with Rama and Childhood's End will be read in conjunction with Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. We will read Solaris by Lem and see one or both films made of it. Faber’s Under the Skin interrogates our treatment of animals by making us prey to aliens and The Book of Strange New Things tells the daring story about a minister who has been asked by a non-human race to continue his missionary work on Oasis, with no concept that his idea of Christianity doesn’t square with theirs. We end with Ted Chiang’s story and its film adaptation, Arrival, which investigates cultural barriers created by language, body, and foreign ground—matters that drive all stories about the Otherworld, and the complex problems of misreading each other.

Location

Frederick Douglass Room 403 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

This course will examine the relationship between modern and contemporary works of poetry, the language or languages in which that poetry is written, and the nature of thinking that can be said to occur most intensely in poetic art. At the origin of this version of poetic modernity, Whitman occupies a very large place. We will consider poets and poems in several literary and linguistic traditions, primarily English, French, Spanish and German, though all texts will be read in English. We will also spend some time considering the importance of the Western reception of Japanese verse forms, like Haiku, and Chinese ideograms by Western modernists who continue the Whitman tradition on a global scale.

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Goergen Hall Room 110 (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

Credit to be arranged.

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Credit to be arranged.

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

As a form that hovers between page and stage, dramatic literature disrupts traditional categories of authorship and reception, mind and body, private and public. As a text that is (usually) intended to be performed, drama is innately political. It also has a unique relationship to time: a play changes with every new performance, performer, and production—and yet it arguably retains some essential quality over the days and years and centuries. This course takes a double focus, joining plays from Britain's Restoration Period—just following a period of civil war—with contemporary works that reflect current social and political upheavals (including MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and late capitalism). We will also look at two of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies—Lear and Hamlet--and trace how they were adapted both by 17th- and 18th-century dramatists, as well as by contemporary American and British writers. Authors include Shakespeare, Thomas Shadwell, Nahum Tate, Aphra Behn, and George Lillo, as well as Liz Duffy Adams, Annie Baker, Lynn Nottage, and Jack Thorne. Theorists will include Aristotle, Dryden, Brecht, Artaud, and others.

Location

Morey Room 403 (R 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

The uncanny is an experience or quality that by definition remains difficult to grasp; something that is mysterious and enigmatic, yet also seems oddly familiar.  It is an atmosphere, mood or perhaps a theme that movies have explored since nearly the beginning of cinema. Some theorists have felt that film as a medium could be best approached via the uncanny. In this class, we will read a series of the key texts and try to survey the terrain of the concept of the uncanny. To explore this term this class will draw largely on a tradition of commentary on the German word Das Unheimliche, usually translated as uncanny, that can be traced among Ernst Jentsch, Sigmund Freud, and Martin Heidegger and its relevance to film studies. We will screen films that evoke the experience through their narrative and stylistics, and we will discuss the usefulness of the term for theorizing both film and electronic media, both new and old. This seminar will also explore the nature of film's relation to animation, the "bringing to life" through moving images. It will delve into cinema's relation to other traditions of life-like illusions (from automatons to panoramas), its exploration of the thresholds between animate and inanimate in horror films, fairy tales and comedies, and all of these in relation to what is technically referred to as film animation, both animated films which bring things to life (Brothers Quay, Svankmajer, Cohl) as well as abstract animation which aspires to trace patterns of animation (Fischinger, Ruttmann, Breer). 

Location

Morey Room 403 (M 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course will provide an opportunity to sample an exciting body of contemporary literature, some written by authors already widely acclaimed when they received the Nobel Prize and some by writers suddenly catapulted into fame and international recognition. A central focus of the course will be the literature itself, but we will also look at the kinds of controversies that the prize has always generated – including the 2018 sex scandal that led to the prize’s temporary suspension. One lens for the course, then, will be a study of the logic of cultural prize-giving, especially as it operates in the global marketplace. In the US, where less then 5% of literary writing published each year is literature in translation, Nobel prize-winning titles are often the only contemporary fiction or poetry Americans read in translation. This raises the question of translation and the role of the Nobel Prize in creating and promoting a powerful, if not uncontested, idea of “international” literature. Finally, with only 16 of the 114 prizes awarded since 1901 going to women, we will consider the role of gender in the prize’s history. 

Location

Morey Room 403 (W 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course aims to study how to learn what literature teaches that is not available elsewhere. This theme responds to the often-heard critiques of the humanities. The course seeks to show the specific understandings of men yielded by all “stories,” including those told by nonliterary arts. 
 
Over the past decade globally, the substantive social issues of androcentrism and woman-hating have become increasingly urgent in family life and in public life. Literature, through its language, shows its history, its ubiquity across cultures, its atrocities, and its sources in society. Writers considered include Cormier, Eliot, Levin, Petry, Ovid, Shakespeare, M. Shelley, Tolstoy, and others. Students are invited to consider their own experiences as part of the history of gender struggle in society and to propose works that reflect these experiences.
 
Critics include Gail Bederman, Susan Brownmiller, Barbara Christian, Andrea Dworkin, bell hooks, Bonnie Mann, Elaine Showalter, Virginia Woolf, and others.
 

Location

Morey Room 403 (T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

The yearlong practicum has two components, a practicum group, which is led by a 571 course instructor, and a mentor group, which is led by an experienced WSAP instructor. These two groups involve new instructors in a combination of small group meetings, class observations, individual meetings, and workshops designed to support and further educate new instructors. Small group meetings, classroom observations, and individual meetings offer new teachers a chance to gain different perspectives on their teaching, identify their teaching strengths, and work out solutions to teaching difficulties. The larger goal of all meetings is to encourage instructors to work with colleagues across the disciplines to create a supportive and intellectually challenging community, a community that they can call on throughout their career as educators.

Location

Rush Rhees Library Room G121A (M 9:00AM - 10:15AM)

Under the direction of English Department Faculty and staff of George Eastman Museum’s Moving Image Department, the student will plan and undertake a significant project designed to challenge her/his abilities to function at a professional level in the moving image archive field. Examples of potential projects include: archival projection, public programming and exhibitions, collection management, video and digital preservation techniques, processing and conservation of motion picture related materials, acquisitions, access and cataloging.
 

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

topic specific training/study in film preservation work.

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

No description

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Credit to be arranged.

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Credit to be arranged.

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Shakespeare

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Restoration Drama

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Victorian Crime and Sexuality

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Credit to be arrangedThe following courses may be taken for four hours of graduate credit.

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