Our student advisory council will be making visits to classes in the coming weeks to talk about the English major and minor at Villanova. Here are some of the flyers they'll be showing:
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You can find our English Alumni Careers Booklet here.
View the complete course booklet here
2003 Intro to Creative Writing TR 11:30-12:45, Alan Drew
Designed for students who wish to experiment with composing several kinds of creative writing: short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry.
2013 Writing of Memoir TR 10:00-11:15, Tsering Wangmo
Memoir is an opportunity to understand life. This writing workshop provides students with practical skills in reading and writing about the events, memories, places that inform their lives.
2018 Nature Writing Workshop TR 2:30-3:45, Cathy Staples
The natural world will be a source for the creative non-fiction, poetry, and fiction pieces students will write in this class. Through readings, field trips, writing exercises, and workshops students will learn to sharpen their language and see more deeply.
2023 Journalism TR 11:30-12:45, Kathryn Szumanski
Introduces students to key techniques of news gathering and news writing. We will also explore the principles and rules that guide the writing of news pieces, editorials, and features.
2061 Editing & Publishing MW 3:20-4:35, Adrienne Perry
Literary publishing in a diverse, compelling field involving both art and commerce. This hands- on class explores the economic, social, and artistic forces that shape contemporary literature. Grapple with what it means to "make culture" while honing editorial skills.
2250 Ways of Reading TR 1:00-2:15, Joseph Drury
An exploration of how we engage, understand, explicate, and enjoy texts of all sorts.
2300 Women in Literature MWF 12:50-1:40, Ellen Bonds
Study of the place of women in literature, with emphasis on modern fiction, drama and poetry written in English.
2306 Harry Potter: Quests/Questions MWF 10:40-11:30, Evan Radcliffe
In this course we will use the tools of literary analysis to discuss all seven Harry Potter novels. Central topics will include how the series evolves; Rowling’s use of novelistic form, character and characterization, and literary models; and the books’ representations of gender, class, and other social issues.
2350 Narrative Television MW 4:45-6:00, Lauren Shohet
Plot, character, voice, point of view in visual, aural, dramatic, and verbal aspects of serial television. What works similarly or differently in television and prose fiction? In television and film?
3260 Legacies of Revenge in Drama, Fiction, Comics, and Film R 6:00-8:55, Alice Dailey & Chelsea Phillips
We will study a highly influential 16th c. play called The Spanish Tragedy in the context of western culture’s centuries-long fascination with the dynamics of revenge. We’ll work with and as theatre-makers to contribute to a main stage production of the play in spring 2024. (Spring participation encouraged but optional!)
3440 Harlots, Rakes, & Libertines TR 2:30-3:45, Joseph Drury
Discover the Libertine authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, whose witty, scandalous works promoted a freethinking philosophy of sexual pleasure and individual freedom, and provoked critics who blamed them for modern social problems such as prostitution, poverty, and crime.
3535 Gender, Authorship, & Authority TR 4:45-6:00, Mary Mullen
This class studies how and why women writers used pseudonyms and forged collective authorial identities to grapple with gendered expectations. It considers the knotty politics of authorship, biography, and autobiography in nineteenth-century Britain and the twenty-first century.
3621 Contemporary British Novel & Brexit TR 10:00-11:15, Megan Quigley
This course explores British fiction written after the second World War until today. What stories do novelists tell about the meaning of "Britishness" after the British empire? We investigate themes of nostalgia, xenophobia, feminism, and class warfare in stylistically varied novels.
3650 African Drama MWF 11:45-12:35, Chiji Akoma
Examination of the aesthetics, politics, and practices of the theatre and drama in Africa. Focused on written plays, course explores drama performances on stage, television, and movies. Introduces students to role-playing and small-scale adaptation of texts to American contexts.
4015 Why Indigenous Literature Matters MW 1:55-3:10, Kimberly Takahata
This course introduces students to a vivid spectrum of Indigenous literatures, exploring how Indigenous peoples have expressed their truths and imagined their futures. We will ask: what makes something “literary”? Why do Indigenous literatures matter, inside and outside our classroom?
4510 Early American Poetry MW 3:20-4:35, Travis Foster
We will immerse ourselves in four transformative poets -- Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson – while also considering how their lives and work have inspired contemporary culture from prestige television to Taylor Swift.
4647 Gender & Sexuality in US Literature TR 4:00-5:15, Yumi Lee
This course examines a fascinating range of contemporary US literary texts to explore the ways that gender and sexuality intersect with race, class and other categories of identity to form our experiences of selfhood, community, national belonging, and power.
4651 Lives of the Undocumented MW 2:30-3:45, Tsering Wangmo
The lived experiences of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. told in their own words through memoir, fiction, poetry, graphic novel, testimony, creative and critical essays.
4652 Letters, Texts, & Twitter MW 1:55-3:10, Kamran Javadizadeh
How does writing bring together distant lovers, friends, family? We'll read letters, the digital forms (social media, instant messaging) that have replaced them, and their representation in novels, poems, and essays to explore how intimacy forms across distance.
4690 Crime Fiction & Gender TR 8:30-9:45, Jean Lutes
In this course, you'll study American crime fiction as an intellectually rich phenomenon that dramatizes social and economic realities, asks fundamental questions about the nature of knowledge, and investigates gender and sexuality as well as theft and murder.
4704 Borders in Latinx Literature TR 11:30-12:45, Michael Dowdy
How do borders impact our lives, and how might they be imagined differently? This course examines how “the border” shapes Latinx literatures, from the U.S.-Mexico national boundary to alternative sites and conceptions of borders, including texts by Latinx writers from various national origins and in multiple genres.
5000 Contemporary American Poetry: The Documentary Turn TR 1:00-2:15, Lisa Sewell
This course will focus on recent contemporary poetry that investigates personal and public histories, incorporating documents, research, and the news as much as it relies on poetic inspiration. We will study the history of documentary poetry and read work about the slave trade, refugee crises around the world, natural and unnatural disasters, and historic events.
HON 5440-100 Poets in the Gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Weekend of Oct. 20- 22, 2023, Cathy Staples
The workshop begins on Friday in the Honors seminar room with exercises in memory and observation. On Saturday morning, we’ll take the train into Philadelphia and spend the day at PMA on the parkway. We will write our way through the galleries, using the paintings as well as sculpture and installation as entry points for new poems. On Sunday, we’ll gather to share new work over coffee, tea, French toast, & banana bread.
The English Course Booklet, which is released closer to registration time, will also indicate which courses count toward core diversity requirements, as well as the Writing & Rhetoric Program, Irish Studies, Africana Studies, Gender & Women’s Studies, Peace & Justice, Sustainability, etc.
