Spring 2026
Each semester the faculty for the Department of English provide course descriptions that build upon the University's catalog descriptions. These individually crafted descriptions provide information about variable topics, authors, novels, texts, writing assignments, and whether instructor consent is required to enroll. The details, along with reviewing the advising report, will help students select course options that best meet one's interests and academic requirements.
The following list includes Undergraduate courses that are sequenced after the First-Year Writing requirement and will change each semester.
1000-Level Courses
1616W: Major Works of English and American Literature
Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011.
1616W | MW 1:25-2:40 | Falco, Daniela
The UConn undergraduate catalogue lists ENGL 1616W as a course that “includes important works from the major genres and historical periods since Beowulf”; that is exactly what students will be doing in this class: read notable British and American works of literature, while also getting acquainted (or re-acquainted) with three literary genres: poetry, drama, and fiction (both short stories and novels) and working on refining their academic writing skills.
The poems assigned cover hundreds of years of poetry, with guides such as Shakespeare, Herbert, Marvell, Wordsworth, Blake, Whitman, Frost, Thomas, and Williams—to name a few. Two plays will be read, Hamlet by William Shakespeare, and A Raisin in the Sun by American playwright Lorraine Hansberry, and two novels, 1984 by George Orwell, and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Short stories written by (among others) Kipling, Lawrence, Joyce, Wilde, Melville, Twain, Poe, Hemingway, Updike, etc. will complete the reading list.
Although it is listed as “Lecture,” the course will unfold as a seminar to which students are invited and expected to come prepared as active participants in their own learning process—having done their reading thoroughly and being ready to get involved dynamically in class discussions and activities.
Course requirements: ENGL 1616W has its specific writing requirement, established by GEOC: minimum 15 pages / 4,500 words of revised, polished writing; in this course, three 5-6 page papers, one per literary genre, will fulfill this requirement. In addition, class discussion / participation, reading responses, reading quizzes (all making up the participation grade) and a final exam will be computed into the final grade.
2000-Level Courses
2107: The British Empire, Slavery, and Resistance
Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011
2107 | M 5:00-7:30 | Mulholland, Peter
2200: Literature and Culture of North America before 1800
Also offered as AMST 2200
Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011.
2200 | TuTh 5:00-6:15 | Sommers, Sam
2203: American Literature Since 1880
Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011.
2203 | W 3:35 - 6:05 | Russell, Kara
This course will examine a variety of American literature (novellas, short stories, plays, poems, and one or two film adaptations) chronologically from the end of the Civil War to the present day. Through careful close reading and class discussion we’ll work to identify and appreciate the significance of key literary devices and to examine more broadly prevailing themes that resonated in and through the periods of Regionalism, Naturalism, Modernism, and Contemporary American literature.
Coursework includes class discussion, student presentations, short writing assignments, and in-class examinations.
2301: Anglophone Literatures
Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011.
2301 | MW 11:15-12:30 | Falco, Daniela
<Anglophone literatures> is a capacious term. Simply put, Anglophone fiction refers to fiction written in English; however, in the context of postwar canon formation, Anglophone refers specifically to literature written in English from former British colonies (excluding the United States)— known at one point by the anodyne term Commonwealth literature.
What are the tensions that arise between present and past, between East and West, and between the Global North and the Global South? How are distinctions drawn among places, peoples, and histories? Central to the concerns of course is the relationship between “world literature” and “postcolonial literature.” What do these terms reveal or conceal? How do postcolonial literature and criticism engage readers in more ways of knowing, thinking, and writing? Do literary texts provide a constructive site for generating coherent politics or ethics?
The reading list consists of a selection of twentieth and twenty-first century texts that are situated in a variety of locations including Britain, the Belgian Congo, India, Nigeria, South Africa, Pakistan, and the United States and authored by Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, Jamaica Kincaid, Jean Rhys, Mohsin Hamid, and others. Students will have the opportunity to examine the ways in which colonial power has shaped—and indeed, continues to shape—the world. Tracing a path from Joseph Conrad’s classic text of European imperialism to the more recent novel by J. M. Coetzee, the class will engage with questions of power and representation, violence and memory, gender and sexuality, political activism and critique, and economics and privilege.
Course requirements: Two literary analysis papers, 5 - 7 pages each, a midterm, and a final exam.
3000-Level Courses
3695: ST: Linguistic Diversity in a Social Justic Context
Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011.
3695 | W 9:30 - 10:45 Online Blended | Carillo, Ellen
This course explores grammar within the context of linguistic justice by focusing on how language can be a site of power, identity, and inequality. Students will examine how grammatical norms are often tied to social hierarchies, marginalizing non-standard dialects and varieties of language. The course will address how prescriptive rules about grammar are a means of linguistic discrimination that has consequences especially for those from historically oppressed and marginalized groups. By analyzing both the social implications of grammar and the theoretical frameworks of linguistic justice, students will be able to explain how language is used to uphold or challenge societal norms. Through discussions, case studies, syntheses of the readings, and the development of teaching or other instructive materials (e.g., brochures, infographics), students will engage with topics such as language standardization, code-switching, and the politics of grammar in and beyond education.
This course is blocked by Department Consent and interested students should email inda.watrous@uconn.edu