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:
.png)
.png)
SPRING 2026 UPPER-LEVEL ENGLISH COURSES
2003 Intro to Creative Writing TR 1:00-2:15, Alan Drew
Designed for students who wish to experiment with composing several kinds of creative writing: short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry.
2006 Writing of Poetry TR 8:30-9:45, Cathy Staples
Instruction in poetry writing, including how to craft imagery, figurative language, sound, line, and rhythm, as well as traditional and contemporary forms. Students read widely and write lyric, narrative and experimental poems that are shared in a supportive workshop setting.
2013 Writing of Memoir TR 11:30-12:45, 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.
2023 Journalism MWF 12:50-1:40, Kate 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.
2250 Ways of Reading TR 11:30-12:45, Kamran Javadizadeh
An exploration of how we engage, understand, explicate, and enjoy texts of all sorts.
2360 Adaptation: Film as Literature MW 1:00-2:15, Adrienne Perry
The relationship between movies and literature dates back to film's earliest days. Comparing films and texts allows for an explanation of storytelling and the fascinating choices auteurs make. Plot, tone, and symbolism are considered alongside questions of power and representation.
2994 Reading and Community T 6:00-7:15 for first 10 weeks of the semester, Mary Mullen
Studying the kind of reading that takes place outside of the classroom in book groups and community reads, this course practices reading in community while studying hot new books selected by students in the course. Please note: this is a one-credit course.
3350 Milton: Gender and Genre TR 10:00-11:15, Lauren Shohet
The writing of John Milton has fascinated and infuriated English-speaking people for 350 years. We explore why Milton's sometimes radical ideas about conscience, liberty, gender, and marriage remain influential, and how other writers (especially women) have responded to Milton.
3425 British Gothic Fiction TR 4:00-5:15, Joseph Drury
Traces the development of British gothic fiction from the late eighteenth century to today, exploring its themes of violence, sexuality, anxiety and social turmoil alongside its historical contexts and major theoretical approaches to understanding this genre.
3622 Virginia Woolf TR 2:30-3:45, Megan Quigley
Virginia Woolf, novelist, essayist, and diarist, is one of the most influential 20th-Century Writers. Woolf explores the self, modernity, depression, and the joy of an ardent feminist life. We will read Woolf's novels and contemporary debates about form, gender, and sexuality.
3660 Contemporary Literature & Film in India TR 2:30-3:45, Tsering Wangmo
India produces some of the most innovative and engrossing literature in the world, while also releasing more films than any other nation. Through both forms, we'll explore debates in contemporary India concerning border tensions, caste, gender, fantasy, and imperial histories.
4010 Early Textual Bodies MW 3:20-4:35, Kimberly Takahata
This course asks: how can we read about early American bodies, and how are bodies legible? We will chart how Indigenous, Black, and settler persons used developing forms and genres to navigate identity in texts from sixteenth- through nineteenth- century America.
4624 Crime Fiction and Gender MWF 9:35-10:25, Jean Lutes
This course studies crime and detective fiction as an intellectually rich phenomenon preoccupied by gender/sexuality. It examines how crime narratives from the nineteenth century to the present critique socioeconomic realities and address fundamental questions about the nature of knowledge.
4646 Race and Ethnicity: American Novel MW 4:45-6:00, 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.
4702 Authors On & Off the Page TR 4:00-5:15, Alan Drew & Adrienne Perry
Do you love to write? Dream of visiting with authors to discuss their work and the publishing world? This course combines creative writing workshops with literary analysis and the chance to hob-nob with prestigious authors during the Villanova Literary Festival.
5000 Melville MW 1:55-3:10, Travis Foster
Encounter 19th-century America through its most challenging writer. From the high seas of Moby-Dick to the urban claustrophobia of “Bartleby” and the moral fog of Benito Cereno, we'll explore Melville’s prophetic visions and relentless critique of American exceptionalism. The course culminates with the somber poetic examination of the Civil War, Battle-Pieces, and an original research project positioning Melville as a vital voice on the nation’s ongoing crises.
5000 Adaptation: Page, Stage, Film TR 11:30-12:45, Lauren Shohet
How and why do artists recycle old stories? In this seminar, we’ll explore ways that inherited texts move into different media, settings, and contexts: myth into film, poem into novel, medieval Scotland into twentieth-century South Africa. Together, we will study some theories of adaptation (how is cultural adaptation like/unlike genetic evolution? Is the book always better than the movie?) and consider a variety of adaptive projects (the Coen brothers Odyssey movie O Brother, Where Art Thou; Nina MacLaughlin’s contemporary feminist retellings of Ovid; and a range of ways Macbeth has been retold on stage, screen, and page). For your capstone paper, each of you will revisit a text you’ve studied before (or always wanted to), then research and write about its afterlives (or its heritage).
