Fall 2025
ENL 200: Introduction to Graduate Studies in English
Mike Ziser
This course is an introduction to the profession of literary studies, to components of literary and cultural research that have been prominent in the field of literary criticism, and to the UC Davis PhD program. On the research side, we will discuss shared readings that showcase approaches to literary research, including histories of circulation and reception, formal analysis, archival research, and interpretive methods. You will also work through these approaches to research by completing a series of short research papers oriented by a literary or cultural text of your choice, as well as a conference-length presentation due at the end of the quarter. We’ll also cover a wide array of topics related to the profession, including scholarly organizations and journals; anxiety and “imposter syndrome”; conference presentations; short-form academic (and para-academic) genres; navigating UC Davis as a graduate student; and career planning.
PFS 265: Media, Performance, and Embodiment
Gina Bloom
In this course, we’ll read foundational theory at the intersection of performance studies and media studies to explore the relationship between human bodies and performance technologies, including but not exclusively digital technologies. Students will select a performance object of their choice as their focus for the course: this can be anything from a particular production (including a production of the student’s own making), an object that does performative work on the theater stage (e.g. costume, props), a digital object (e.g. videogame, database), a practice (e.g. Meyerhold biomechanics, yoga), or a genre of performance (e.g. circus, poetry slam, puppetry). Students are also welcome to theorize their own performance work as their performance object.
ENL 237: “The More Than Human World in Contemporary Literature”
Pam Houston
This class will investigate the power and strategies of contemporary works of literature that take as their subject (and take seriously) the more than human world. Animals, fish, plants, geologic formations, as well as realities that may exist parallel to the realities the dominant culture takes for granted. We will contemplate ourselves as creatures. We will consider models of thinking (practiced historically and currently by Indigenous cultures) of ourselves in relation to the nonhuman beings on this planet that may not have led so inevitably to climate collapse and fascistic uprising (just to name two things). We will consider why the same machine that wants to kill wolf puppies and bear cubs in their dens also wants to deny women, queer and trans people bodily autonomy. We will consider the problematic nature of the word anthropomorphize, of consistently assigning little or no “intelligence” to beings we wish to oppress. We will imagine living within a system where the inherent and ancient knowledge of plants and animals was revered rather than ignored, a world in which more humans learned how to listen. We may even imagine the future of an Earth that has managed to shake vast numbers of its most relentless parasite off its back.
There will be weekly writing assignments (mostly creative) and one seminar paper (some combination of creative and scholarly) that each student and the teacher will agree upon. Grades will be based on the quality of the class discussion, the completion of the weekly creative assignments, and the quality of the 20 (ish) page seminar paper, which can be a combination of creative and scholarly writing if the student wishes.
Texts:
How Far The Light Reaches, Sabrina Imbler
What We Fed To The Manticore, Talia Lakshmi Kolluri
Nobody Gets Out Alive, Leigh Newman
Life In A Field, Katie Peterson
Pig Son, (short story), Sequoia Nagamatsu
The Bear, Andrew Krivak
The Council of Animals, Nick McDonell
The Removed, Brandon Hobson
Gods of Jade and Shadow, Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
The Blue Fox, Sjón
Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko
ENL 246: “Cosmocriticism and Celestial Entanglements from Copernicus to Cavendish”
Tiffany Jo Werth
This course examines how historical celestial aspirations, from Copernicus to the heliocentric revolution and imagined lunar voyages, shape contemporary attitudes toward space exploration. Recent Presidential proclamations to “plant the stars and stripes on Mars” revitalize a long history of celestial imaginings within western culture. Yet conventional nationalist rhetoric seldom examines the cultural attitudes that help grow such ambitions. This study heeds medievalist Carl Phelphstead’s call for “cosmocriticsm,” to examine how attitudes toward heaven shape those on earth. Its methodology draws upon recent schools of thought under the rubric of posthumanist theory that seeks to respond to the entangled relations of systems, bodies, and species. Its archive will be early modern literary texts, visual culture, and astronomical instruments and observatories to connect past imaginings of the heavens with modern space ethics. Participants in the seminar may have opportunities to join two related research events, a symposium on the early modern sky sponsored by the UCLA Clark Library (Feb 26) and a Newberry Library / Adler Planetarium workshop (April 26). This class will cover seminal literary texts from the 16 th and 17 th century historical fields lists.
ENL 290NF: Creative Writing Workshop: Nonfiction
Zinzi Clemmons
ENL 290P: Creative Writing Workshop: Poetry
Cindy Juyoung Ok
Winter 2026
ENL 238: “Narrative Ecology”
Tobias Menely
“Every place,” Tim Ingold observes, “is a knot of stories.” Narratives, Eleanor Hayman writes, “emerge from and are co-dependent with ecological processes.” Humans, according to Sylvia Wynter, are “a storytelling species” who have come to tell a powerful story that denies “the storytelling origins” of our identities. This seminar will explore theories of narrative in the Environmental Humanities. How should we understand the ecological implications of key concepts of narrative theory, such as equilibrium, sequence, change, closure, and causality? What are the stakes of conceptualizing nonhumans as narrative agents—or even narrative-makers? What are the implications of defining narrative as a definitively human form of meaning-making or even as the underlying form of all knowledge? How do narratives represent non-linear change and emergent phenomena in complex socio-ecological systems? Is climate fiction a form of “cultural geoengineering”? In a time of planetary change, do we need “new stories”? How can literary studies broaden its terrain of study by recognizing non-textual forms of “storywork,” including oral storytelling? How might the “planetary” be incorporated into theories of world literature? If we ascribe a “world-making” power to narrative, what is the role of the listener or reader, the critic or theorist?
ENL 240: “Gender, Sexuality, and Hagiography”
Claire Waters
This course will offer an introduction to the enormously influential genre of saints’ lives (hagiography), with particular attention to the new approaches to gender and sexuality that Christian beliefs and practices brought to the late-Roman and medieval worlds. From the young Roman matron Perpetua, who dreamed of herself as a man the night before entering the gladiatorial arena, to the virgin martyrs who rejected familial and governmental pressure to marry, to kings like the martyred Edmund or the childless Edward the Confessor whose lives and deaths challenged traditional masculine ideals, saints were often in conflict with their cultures’ traditions around behavior, dress, marriage, and procreation. Beginning with work on saints in early Christian culture by Peter Brown, Virginia Burrus, and others, and reading up through recent scholarship in gender, sexuality, and trans studies, we will consider how the narratives and characteristics of this resilient and widely represented genre intersect with modern concerns about identity, authenticity, and self-expression. Works in Latin and Old French will be read in translation; those in Middle English will mostly be from editions with substantial glosses, and we will practice working with the language in seminar. No previous knowledge of Middle English is expected or needed.
ENL 270: “Climate Ideologies”
Akua Banful
This course examines the cultural and ideological dimensions of ‘climate’ through the literary and cultural productions of nineteenth and twentieth-century tropical societies during and after empire. Our explorations will make landfall in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, interrogating how ideologies of racial capital, socialism, and countercultural aesthetic rebellions mobilize ideas of climate and the environment in the process of worldmaking.
ENL 288: Prospectus Workshop
Margaret Ronda
ENL 290F: Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction
Lucy Corin
ENL 290P: Creative Writing Workshop: Poetry
Katie Peterson
Spring 2026
EVH 200: Introduction to the Environmental Humanities
Liz Miller & Louis Warren
EVH200 is the core seminar for graduate students from various disciplinary backgrounds in the humanities and beyond with an interest in pursuing the Designated Emphasis in Environmental Humanities. In this class we will discuss key issues, themes, questions, and debates in the environmental humanities through discussions of classic and contemporary readings in the main fields that have contributed to EH scholarship. In addition to close engagement with specific texts, we will think about the history of the field and the interrelationships between its various elements and about the most significant questions in current research. By the end of the seminar, we hope you will be able to situate environmental scholarship in your home discipline within the environmental humanities and connect it to work carried on in other fields.
CRI 200B. TBD
Joshua Clover
ENL 233: “Racial and Colonial Geographies”
Hsuan Hsu
This course will consider how particular modes of understanding, producing, and relating to space have been mobilized to sustain, reshape, and/or generate alternatives to racial and colonial capitalism. In addition to discussing recent research in critical infrastructure studies, Black feminist geography, settler colonial studies, Indigenous studies, and critical ethnic studies, we will study a range of literary works that stage the making and unmaking of racial and colonial geographies through detailed renderings of lived, embodied experience. In addition to covering a range of methodologies and theoretical conversations, our readings will focus on examples drawn from American literature and culture.
ENL 237: “Reading in Translation”
Cindy Juyoung Ok
Learning from translation practices, issues, and controversies, including the greatest hits of the 19th and 20th Century alongside current discourse. Basic knowledge with applied practices for creative writers (critical PhD students including beyond English welcome). Translation experience is not expected, and advanced proficiency in another language is not required.
ENL 252: “Victorian Militarism”
Kathleen Frederickson
This course will examine how mid- to late-Victorian literature mediated armed conflict within Europe, in its own formal empire, and in the informal empire it practiced elsewhere in the world. We will likely begin with a cluster of texts on the Crimean war, including Mary Seacole’s account of her time at the front and Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade”. From there, we will move to the 1857 Indian Rebellion, reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four alongside Zahir Dehlvi’s firsthand account from inside the Mughal court of Bahadur Shah Zafar. We will remain focused on India as we turn to the imperial spycraft of “The Great Game” in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. To conclude the course, we will consider rebellion and informal empire in Uruguay by reading William Henry Hudson’s The Purple Land that England Lost. In addition to these texts, we will read history and anticolonial theory in order to situate our conversations.
ENL 289: Article Writing Workshop
Sal Nicolazzo
ENL 290F: Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction
Maceo Montoya
ENL 290NF: Creative Writing Workshop: Nonfiction
Pam Houston