Fall 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.
2000-Level Courses
2274W: Disability in American Literature and Culture
Also offered as AMST 2274W
Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011.
2274W| MWF 9:05 - 9:55| Horn, Jacob
2407W: The Short Story
Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011.
Honors Section
2407W| TuTh 8:00 - 9:15 | Shea, Tom
This course in the Short Story will center on a nexus of three valences:
- CSI Detective thinking via authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes)
- Diverse, International authors (e.g. Polish, British, Indian, Irish, American).
- Collections of short stories as coherent, organic wholes (e.g. James Joyce’s Dubliners, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time).
We will also take full advantage of the Wadsworth Atheneum, exploring links between our short stories and the various artistic masterpieces one-half block away.
Course grades will be based on Active, Verbal lass Participation—50% of your semester grade, occasional brief writings, a Midterm Essay, and a Final Essay.
All writing will constitute the other 50% of your semester grade.
Usually, NO FINAL EXAM.
Email Thomas.Shea@uconn.edu for a permission number if needed.
2409: The Modern Novel
Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011.
2409 TuTh 11:00 - 12:15 | Shea, Tom
The purpose of this course is to enhance our appreciation of the Modern Novel as it develops during the 20th – 21st centuries. Our range of authors may span from Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway to Martin McDonagh and Claire Keegan.
We will also take full advantage of the Wadsworth Atheneum, exploring links between our novels and the various artistic masterpieces one-half block away.
Course grades will be based on Active, Verbal Participation—50% of your semester grade, occasional brief writings, a Midterm Essay, and a Final Essay. All writing will constitute the other 50% of your semester grade.
Usually, NO FINAL EXAM.
Questions? Email Thomas.Shea@uconn.edu
2470: Texts, Images, Objects
Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011
2470 | MWF 1:25 - 2:15 | Kneidel, Greg
This is a course about literature and the visual arts and about collecting, editing, and exhibiting practices as constitute an often overlooked aspect of telling stories, creating knowledge, and shaping culture. The literature we study will be primarily poetry about art; we will take regular trips to the Wadsworth Atheneum; and basic cartooning will be one grade component. Skill and training in drawing are not required, but a willingness to draw and revise drawings is.
Content Areas: CA1: Arts & Humanities
Topics of Inquiry: TOI1:Creativity TOI2: Cultural
2603: Literary Approaches to the Bible
Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011
2603 | MWF 12:20 - 1:10 | Kneidel, Greg
Critical approaches to, and literary and cultural influences of, the Bible in English translation. We will focus on the David story (1 and 2 Samuel) and the Jesus story (Mark and John), and we will read two modern texts about how these stories came into existence: Heym’s The King David Report (1972) and Beard’s Lazarus is Dead (2011). We will also look at recent film and mini-series versions of these stories and visit the Wadsworth Atheneum across the street to study biblically-themed art. Fulfills the Early Literary, Cultural, and Linguistic History major requirement.
Content Areas: CA1: Arts & Humanities
Topics of Inquiry: TOI1:Creativity TOI2: Cultural
2635E: Literature and the Environment
Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011.
2635E | TuTh 12:30 -1:45| Choffel, Julie
In this class we will explore the many ways that literature reflects and shapes our relationship to the environment: How do the concepts we encounter about our environment frame the human and the nonhuman, the natural and the unnatural, the living and the nonliving? How does our understanding of these shift our roles within these ecologies? We will learn from environmental texts in multiple genres literature and visual media. Class discussion and group activities will be essential to the course. Assignments will include reading notes, a nature journal, short response papers, and a final project with options for working in genres that most appeal to each student.
2701: Creative Writing I
Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011 or 2011. May not be taken out of sequence after passing ENGL 3701, 3703, or 3713
2701 | TuTh 9:30 - 10:45 | Choffel, Julie
This course provides an introduction to the writer’s workshop in poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction. We will approach creative writing as an experimental process that thrives in the shared perspectives of both author and reader. In this class you will be required to read and write daily through new styles and forms; to take unexpected turns and risks in your own writing, to take it apart and reconstruct through creative revision, and above all, to contribute to conversations about the results. We will talk and write about what we read and what we write and what happens next. Immersed in this practice, you will create your own works of poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction, and revise your strongest works for a final portfolio. Everyone will also participate in a collaborative performance of poetry and music on the Hartford campus. Additional class requirements include keeping a writer’s journal, completing writing assignments and workshop feedback on time, and participating in every class.
4000-Level Courses
4203W:Advanced Study: Ethnic Literature
Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011
4203W | W 11:15 - 12:30 Online Blended| Campbell, Scott
In ENGL 4203W: Blutopias and Freedom Dreams, we will explore utopian visions of Black American writers and musicians in and around the Black Power / Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. These are artists who sought ways to express, test, and rethink freedom, actors who sought to challenge and reimagine the realities of post-WWII America. Their creativity, energy, and urgency still resonates today, and we will consider their legacy and the demands their work places on us as participants in the future they tried to imagine.
In the course, we’ll examine controversies around “out” or “free” music and look into relationships between writing, sound, and community. What would a Black utopia look like, feel like, sound like? ENGL4203W is organized around various sites of real and imagined Black experience, including Harlem/NYC, Chicago, Pan-African identity, and Outer Space. We will address a wide range of multimodal texts, including literature but also sound recordings, art, and film. The writing you do here will include writing with and about sounds and images. Throughout, we will keep close attention on the deep entwinement of cultural experience and the social, political, and economic forces that impinge on and form identity.
ENGL 4203W is a “capstone” course for the English major, and it emulates the approach and goals of a graduate seminar, as a series of related investigations, not a set of lessons. Our work here is driven by close study of both primary and secondary sources. We will explore some scholarship related to our texts and inquiries, and your independent work will allow you to add to and diverge from established lines of thought.
Contact Prof. Campbell scott.campbell@uconn.edu with any questions.