Fall 2025 Graduate Courses

Department of English

Graduate Course Descriptions

Fall 2025

 

PDF Download: Fall 2025 Graduate Courses

 

Eng 600        Introduction to Graduate Studies: Required for all first year students

Solinger        M 3-5:30

                        solinger@go.olemiss.edu

 

This course is an introduction to theory and methods for graduate study, with emphasis on the impact of theoretical schools of thought on the evolution of the profession.

  

Eng 679                            Form, Craft, and Influence: How to Fall Down into the Grass: A Nature Writing & Reading Exploration

Nezhukumatathil       M 6-8:30

                                         acnezhuk@olemiss.edu

Taking the title of this class from Mary Oliver’s poem, “Summer Day,” we will investigate how the genre of nature writing (with a focus on non-fiction and poetry) can help re-establish our sense of place and heighten our awareness of how we are interconnected with other living beings. You will be required to keep and maintain a nature journal for the entire semester (and hopefully beyond). Though this is not a traditional workshop class, we will have some short creative writing assignments where you will apply the techniques and styles from the texts we read this semester for use in our own essays and poems, and take short excursions to discover nature in and around Oxford.

                 

Eng 680                 Graduate Fiction Workshop

Ginsburg                 T 3-5:30

                                  mginsburg@olemiss.edu

This is an intensive fiction workshop. Content varies and may be repeated three times for credit.

Eng 682                 Graduate Poetry Workshop

Fennelly                 W 3-5:30

                                 bafennel@olemiss.edu

This is an intensive poetry workshop. Content varies and may be repeated three times for credit.

Eng 711                 Shakespeare for Our Time

Raber                    TH 3-5:30

                                kraber@olemiss.edu

Ben Jonson’s elegy “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author William Shakespeare” concludes with the proposition that Shakespeare “was not of an age, but for all time.” In this course we’ll put that sentiment to the test: what does Shakespeare have to offer in our time, dire as it is? We’ll read a selection of plays in the context of trans studies, queer studies, critical race theory, environmental justice, and other relevant approaches. Students will craft a semester-long research project in stages so that they may revise their own work; they will also submit weekly reading responses. Let’s see how Shakespeare might still be useful to “shake a lance / … brandish’d at the eyes of ignorance.”

 

Eng 738                 Special Topics in Film Study: Louisiana Through the Lens

Duck                     W 6-8:30

                                  lduck@olemiss.edu

 

This course asks not only how cinema has represented Louisiana—creating images, styles and genres through which to imagine that state—but also how it has influenced and been influenced by broader developments, including changing race relations; developing industries (especially oil, tourism, and other aspects of the cultural economy); Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath; and ongoing ecological crises. We will discuss films in relation to national and even international film history—as productions in the state provide a distinct window into some of cinema’s most interesting movements—but we will attend especially to works generating innovative images of local and regional lives. Viewings are open to some negotiation and will include documentary and fiction film. Readings will explore relevant film histories and genres, as well as theoretical approaches to entanglements of aesthetics, race, space, and ecology. Course requirements include active participation in discussion, weekly written responses to course materials, and a final project open to some negotiation; projects will be preceded by a prospectus and annotated research bibliography as well as a class symposium in which students present their work.

Eng 742                 Studies in Gender: Gender Theory

Harker                   M 3-5:30

                                  Jlharker@olemiss.edu

Gender theory is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that questions cultural assumptions about sexuality and gender. Rather than viewing sexuality and gender expression as natural and fixed, gender theorists interrogate the ways that specific cultures frame certain gender identities as normal and others as deviant. As an interdisciplinary mode of analysis, gender theory incorporates the literary, the historical, the political, the sociological, the biological, the cultural, and the postcolonial. In this course, we will look at some of the most influential theories of gender and also consider how competing theories of gender and challenges to social construction—including critiques of biological discourse and trans theory—have influenced gender theory. Theorists include Jack Halberstam, Judith Butler, Jasmine Puar, Chandra Mohanty, Gloria Anzaldua, L.H. Stallings, Susan Stryker, and more.  Students will write a weekly 500-word response journal and a 20-page final seminar paper.

 

Eng 766                 Readings in Media Studies

Purcell                   T 6-8:30

                                  repurcel@olemiss.edu

 

This course will provide you with an introduction to the key ideas, debates and scholarly figures within media studies. In the last thirty or so years, “media studies” has become an omnibus term within the U.S. academy to describe a broad set of emergent fields and subfields (sound studies, science and technology studies, television studies, internet studies, gaming studies etc…) that has come into tension with (and one could also say have become inseparable from) long standing academic fields like film and cinema studies, communications and mass communications, journalism and rhetoric. To read within media studies will require us to think through and ask questions about changes to the humanistic fields and disciplines we work within as scholars and how these changes reflect broader political economic, technological and political changes in the late-20th into the 21st centuries.  In this course, you will get a history of the idea of “media”, the multi and interdisciplinary way scholars have studied it as well as read within more recent conversations in a variety of media studies disciplines regarding the ontological status of media itself. This is to say, in our more recent turn towards describing engagements with media as an inherently transmedial experience (as well as the disappearance of certain material hardware associated with media), what is the point of talking about discrete media forms and formats? The most important thing I hope you take away from this course is an introductory set of methods and analytical approaches that will be valuable to you as professionalizing scholars. We will read, watch, listen, play and interface with a wide range of works and think with them alongside the writings of thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, Marshall McLuhan, Stuart Hall, Lisa Nakamura,  Alexander Galloway, Tiziana Terranova, Ann Cvetkovich, McKenzie Wark, The DISCO Collective, Christian Fuchs, Simone Browne, and others.

ENG TBD                Title TBD

Schillig Chair            T 6-8:30

                                    engl@olemiss.edu

Course description to be announced at a later date.