| ENL 010B Lit in English II | Nicolazzo | TR 1030-1150; R 1810-1900 |
This course offers a broad introduction to some of the diverse genres, authors, and topics that characterize literature written in English between 1700 and 1900. This was a period in which print became a commercial industry, "author" became a profession, and literature became a mass-media phenomenon. Anglophone literature became truly global in this period: both as a tool of British and US empire-building, but also as a medium of resistance against colonization. This period also saw radical historical transformations: revolutions and the establishments of new democracies; the Industrial Revolution and the rise of fossil-fuel energy regimes; struggles to end slavery across the globe; debates over gender and the role of women in public life, and more. Literary authors took an active role in debating, imagining, and shaping these historical transformations. You'll learn about how our authors understood, imagined, and reflected on the worlds they lived in by strengthening your foundational skills in close reading, attentive noticing, and intellectually ambitious and experimental writing. Frequent in-class informal writing, annotation exercises, and interactive reading will help you build the muscles of sustained focus and learn helpful tools for reading grammatically complex, historically distant, and intellectually challenging texts. You'll strengthen your critical reading skills, expand your vocabulary, and stretch your imagination. And as a final bonus: this class will be mostly screen-free to give our brains the space and capacity to slow down, read deeply, and experience texts together. All reading will be on paper (a course reader and two paperback books). | ||
| ENL 010C Lit in English III | Solomon | MWF 1210-1300; W 1810-1900 |
| ENL 040 Intro Topics in Lit | Badley | MWF 1100-1150 |
This class will introduce students to the food memoir, a genre of autobiography that charts the relationship between food and identity. We’ll read a range of memoirs devoted to cooking, eating, and hungering—for food and much else besides. In addition to M. F. K. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me (1943) and Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (1964), we will consider contemporary texts including Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017), Alice Waters’ Coming to My Senses (2017), and Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart (2021). Students can expect to learn more about the interdisciplinary fields of food studies and life writing, especially as they pertain to the textual construction of race, gender, sexuality, diaspora, and the senses. This course fulfills the Arts & Humanities (AH) and Writing Experience (WE) general education requirements. | ||
| ENL 041 Intro Topics Lit & Media ** TOPIC: TBA ** | Lee | TR 1510-1630 |
| ENL 046 Topics: Creative Writing | Gouirand | TR 1210-1330; R 1810-1900 |
| ENL 057 Lit of Climate Change | Hsu | MW 1030-1150 |
Literatures of Climate Change What can literature, storytelling, and close reading contribute to understandings of climate change? In this course, we will consider diverse works of climate fiction (or “Cli-Fi”), poetry, film, nonfiction, and cultural theory. We will reflect on how these texts build on climate science, as well as the questions they provoke about the origins and social and cultural implications of climate change. We will consider how the meanings of climate change shift across different communities situated across North America, Bangladesh, the Marshall Islands, Guam, Kenya, and China. And we will discuss how climate writers reframe history, politics, and speculation about the future in relation to concepts and movements such as the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, deep time, climate justice, and Afrofuturism. | ||
| ENL 100F Creat Writ: Fiction | Ok | MW 1210-1330 |
| ENL 100P Creat Writ: Poetry | Peterson | TR 1030-1150 |
| “Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter,” goes Californian Robert Hass’ translation of 17th century Japanese haiku genius Basho. “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry,” writes Emily Dickinson. “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things,” declares nature-loving British Catholic convert priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. “Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know,” said feminist icon Adrienne Rich. In this class we will use poems to experience the world more deeply, derange our senses, re-enchant our world, and know what we don’t know. We’ll write landscape poems, love poems, letter poems, sorrow songs, and protest songs as we explore the short lyric, supporting each other with close reading and encouragement. Our texts will include an anthology, a book of contemporary verse, and a craft book. | ||
| ENL 100PA Creat Writ: Adv Poetry | Peterson | TR 1210-1330 |
| In this advanced course, student poets will write original work and workshop those poems in a small community of their peers. Writers will create poems every week and write extensive commentary on the work of others. We will read two extremely different works of contemporary poetry – American-born English transplant Erica McAlpine’s deft formal Small Pointed Things, and first-generation Spanish-American Rosa Alcala’s wild and confrontational You. In thinking about how poems are made, we will be thinking about the value of reading and other influences, and we will consider this contemporary work in the light of precursors – for McAlpine, the British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and for Alcala, William Carlos Williams, with whom she shares a hometown. A final project will ask students to choose and think about their own influences, not simply in poetry but in music, art, the culinary arts, design, and media. Throughout our goal will be to create a writing practice – not just to write interesting poems, but to encounter experience as an artist with creative priorities. | ||
| ENL 106 English Grammar | Ferris | F 0900-0950; TR 1340-1500 |
| ENL 110A Intro Literary Theory | Stratton | TR 1340-1500; R 1810-1900 |
| ENL 111 Topics in Medieval Lit | Vernon | TR 1030-1150; R 1210-1300 |
| The Monster Class of Monsters This class will consider a broad sweep of medieval English literature, from roughly 900-1500, through the cracked mirror of monstrosity. The goal of this class will be to learn how to engage with the literatures and material culture of the Middle Ages by reading through some of its fears and unconscious desires, where medieval writers invite you off the map and into the unknown. We will be looking at a variety of genres from sagas to lais to romances to drama. Through this we will see how medieval writers thought about what constituted the human, how they engaged with peoples beyond their known world, and how they imagined alternative futures through monstrous bodies. Ultimately we will consider the lingering presence of the Middle Ages in our lives, as we continue to harbor some of the same anxieties and terrors derived from our encounters with those early writings. | ||
| ENL 122 Milton | Menely | TR 1340-1500; R 1810-1900 |
John Milton (1608-1674) is the author of Paradise Lost, the most important epic in English, a poem that seeks to “justify the ways of God to men” by emphasizing the role of human choice in sacred history. Milton’s heterodox theology was aligned with his radical politics. He wrote pamphlets justifying the execution of a tyrannical monarch and in support of rights to divorce and free speech. In this course, we will read some of Milton’s powerful short poems and prose writings, but our main focus will be Paradise Lost, a cosmic poem—it has been called the first work of science fiction—that is also a profoundly moving exploration of rebellion and its consequences, of innocence and experience, of education and vocation, of love and loss. This course fulfills the Writing Experience Literacy GE and the Arts & Humanities GE. | ||
| ENL 130 British Romantic Lit | Camoglu | TR 1210-1330 |
| The Romantic age was a “restless” one. Industrialization, enclosures, political censorship, colonialism, slavery and slave trade, and revolutions across the world left their marks on the literature of the time. It was this tumultuous history that romantics attempted to capture or escape in their writing as they came up with concepts like the organic unity and negative capability, and engaged with the politicized systems of aesthetics such as Orientalism and Philhellenism. That is to say, the “restlessness” of the romantic age had deep poetical, philosophical and political dimensions. In this course we will learn about these different yet interconnected layers of the Romantic imagination, as we read poems, essays, novels and travelogues by well-known and understudied authors of the age. | ||
| ENL 145 Race, Class, & Gender | Badley | TR 900-1020 |
Race, class, and gender: when people think of identity, they often think of these categories. This class explores the literary and cultural history of race, class, and gender throughout the long twentieth century in the United States. We’ll begin in the late nineteenth century, examining how Mark Twain, Sui Sin Far, and James Weldon Johnson engage histories of racism, passing, and immigration in Puddn’head Wilson (1894), Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) respectively. Then, we’ll consider three contemporary texts that develop an intersectional approach to identity: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), and Imogen Binnie’s Nevada (2013). Students can explore to learn more about how race, class, and gender acquire meaning through historical practices and cultural texts. Literary works will be read alongside scholarship in critical race and ethnic studies as well as feminist, queer, and trans theory. This course fulfills the Arts & Humanities (AH) and Writing Experience (WE) general education requirements. | ||
| ENL 149 Topics in Literature "Later American Satire" | Stratton | TR 900-1020 |
Want to read and think and write intensively about fiction and films where apocalypse is a good joke, rich people think they’re the victims, and history’s atrocities return with a vengeance? Ready to read challenging, dense, subtle texts that will probably offend you at least once? Do you suspect that realism can’t handle the truth because reality itself is so distorted? This is your class. We’ll think about how satire’s ancient techniques push comedy and tragedy into absurdity, surrealism, hilarity, and horror. From doomsday farce to late-capitalist burnout and brutal historical reckoning, we’ll also debate whether satire is a useful weapon or just another part of the problem. You’ll expect to laugh at things you’re not supposed to find funny, to read and write a lot, to cringe with deep discomfort, to engage profane texts that won’t let you get away with the usual clichés. Happy endings are for other classes, and you’ll be expected to approach difficult textual, ethical, and historical problems from multiple, competing perspectives – even ones that offend you. | ||
| ENL 155B 19th-Century British Novel | Tinonga-Valle | MWF 1100-1150 |
| ENL 157 Detective Fiction | Solomon | MWF 1410-1500 |
| ENL 166 Love Contemporary American Poetry | Ronda | TR 1030-1150 |
Love and Desire in Contemporary American Poetry This course will examine the “lover’s discourse” of twentieth- and twenty-first- century American poetry. We will consider how poems represent the various states and stages of eros through different genres, tropes, and figures. We will also explore the necessarily political and cultural valences of love, from queer intimacies to ecological interrelation to revolutionary desire. And we’ll think, as well, about how various poems portray the ends of love, what philosopher Roland Barthes calls its “last words.” This course is intended to teach students about the forms and modes of representation central to the traditions of love poetry, focusing sustained attention on key forms such as sonnets, elegies, odes, lyric, and epistolary poems and on central techniques such as apostrophe and blason. At the same time, the course will explore the innovations of modern and contemporary North American poetry, as poets experiment with old forms and invent new ones to write of the manifold experiences of love in a changing world. GEs: Arts & Humanities (AH); American Cultures, Governance, & History (ACGH); Writing Experience (WE). | ||
| ENL 171 Game Studies Seminar | Boluk | T 1310-1600; R 1310-1600 |
| ENL 173 Science Fiction | Milburn | TR 1210-1330 |
| ENL 177 Study Indiv Author | Milburn | TR 1340-1500 |
| ENL 185C Lit by Women after 1900 | Frederickson | MWF 1310-1400; W 1410-1500 |
| ENL 187A Literature & Media | Lee | TR 1210-1330; R 1710-2000 |
| ENL 187A Literature & Media Group | Bloom | TR 310-1630; T 1710-2000 |
Shakespeare and New Technologies: From VR to AI
The course examines how recent technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), mixed reality (MR), and virtual reality (VR) are shaping the experience of Shakespeare for 21st century audiences. Students will not only read about, but experience first-hand, a number of interactive creative projects that use novel technologies to stage--or enable their users to stage--Shakespeare’s plays. As some of these projects are currently being developed at UC Davis, students will be directly involved in cutting edge research on Shakespeare and new technologies. Some questions we will consider: What are the limitations and affordances of recent technologies for reimagining Shakespeare in the 21st century? To what extent do these technologies help us gain new insights into Shakespeare’s plays? How are experiments with new technologies changing more traditional ways of experiencing Shakespeare in classrooms, theaters, popular media, and public spaces? Are these changes beneficial and, if so, for whom and why?
A more practical aim of this course is to help students think about how a passion for Shakespeare could be channeled into career paths where new technologies have been gaining traction: K-12 teaching, theatre production, game-making, and academic scholarship. To that end, students will focus their term project on a career path that most interests them. For instance, those on a teaching path might create course materials for teaching Shakespeare with new technologies or assess our own course’s approach to this topic; those on a game-making path might prototype a game designed to be played using one of these technologies; those on a theatre path might write a pitch or script for a theatre production that uses a particular technology to re-envision a Shakespeare play; those on a scholarship track might write a research essay examining one or more existing digital Shakespeare projects.
This course grows out of a partnership between the English Department and three research groups at UC Davis: The DataLab, the ModLab, and the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Experimental Futures. Plays we will read: The Tempest, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth | ||
ENL 189 Environmental Poetry | Ronda | TR 1340-1500 |
In this course, we will examine modern and contemporary poetry from North America and beyond in the context of planetary environmental crisis. We'll consider how poetic forms, genres, and themes reflect, and reflect on, on material changes to the natural environment at various scales. We will explore various ecologically-oriented discourses – of cultivation, cohabitation, wilderness, network, pollution, waste, compost, recycling, apocalypse, extinction, and environmental racism – that poets take up and rework. We will also read key works of ecocriticism alongside our primary poetic texts. GEs: Arts & Humanities (AH); Writing Experience (WE). | ||
| ENL 233 Probs In Amer Lit | Hsu | W 1210-1500 |
Racial and Colonial Geographies In this seminar, we will read influential work situated at the intersections of critical race studies and cultural geography that interrogates historical and ongoing entanglements of race, colonialism, and geography. Topics will include Black and Indigenous geographies, the settler colonial subdivision of space, environmental violence, infrastructure, archipelagic American studies, architecture and urban planning, speculative geographies, and works of literature and art that reckon with racial and colonial geographies. | ||
| ENL 237 Seminar for Writers | Ok | W 1210-1500 |
| ENL 252 Victorian Literature | Frederickson | M 1510-1800 |
Nineteenth-Century Militarisms This course will examine fiction and poetry centered around Britain’s military endeavors in the nineteenth century, which shaped politics, economies, and aesthetics both at home and abroad. We will focus on conflicts within Europe (e.g. the Crimean war), the formal empire (e.g. 1857 Indian rebellion), and informal empire (e.g. the opium wars), and “the Great Game” that saw England and Russia competing for influence in Central and South Asia. Texts will include Jane Austen’s Persuasion, W.D. Bernard’s Narrative of the Voyages of the Nemesis, Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade”, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and A. E. W. Mason’s adventure novel The Four Feathers. In addition, we will read a selection of theoretical texts and secondary sources. | ||
| ENL 289 Article Writing Workshop | Nicolazzo | T 1510-1700 |
| This workshop helps graduate students revise a seminar paper, dissertation chapter, conference paper, or other pre-existing work into a journal article for publication. We will discuss the writing and revising process, genre and style, navigating emotional and psychological roadblocks to writing, demystifying the publication process, finding the right journal for your article, reading journal articles as both a researcher and an author, and how to position your work in relation to a specific set of conversations in your field(s). Expect regular writing exercises, short assignments, and frequent peer workshopping to help you transform your piece into a submittable article. | ||
| ENL 290F CW: Fiction | Montoya | M 1210-1400; M 1410-1500 |
| ENL 290NF CW: Non-Fiction | Houston | R 1210-1400; R 1410-1500 |
| ENL 391 Teach Creative Writing | Gouirand | R 1510-1700 |
| ENL 393 Teaching Lit and Comp | ||
Course Schedule Spring 2026
Academic Term
Spring Quarter
Year
2026
Course listings
202603
ENL
Course Schedule Spring 2026