English Course Offerings

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Summer 2026 Undergrad Courses

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EH 390: HORROR, IDENTITY, MADNESS || McLAUGHLIN
MR 1:00 - 2:55
MAYMESTER COURSE:  MAY 11 - JUNE 1

Want to read a twisted love story featuring two tortured neurotics, one a beautiful but uptight hysteric and the other a lonely obsessional? Intelligent erotica based on the perverse sexuality of the exhibitionist, the fetishist, or the voyeur? A horror story with a psychotic killer as your central character? This special topics course on nervous Nellies, pervs, and psychos as seen through the lens of psychoanalysis is the course for you!

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EH 490: WOMEN'S BODIES IN HISTORICAL FICTION || HALBROOKS
MW 2:30 - 5:00
FULL SUMMER TERM: JUNE 3 - JULY 31

“Nothing in man—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men,” writes Foucault. If we mentally edit this language to include women, then this becomes an even richer claim, as gender, of course, is a central aspect of the discourse of the self. Considered from this perspective, historical fiction becomes a more complex challenge than a typical costume drama might suggest. When the historical body disappears, how do we make sense of the historical subject? This course will examine how writers of historical fiction reimagine the bodies of women in the past, focusing on three novels: Lauren Groff’s Matrix, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and Toni Morrison’s A Mercy. Half of the course will be remote, as students prepare presentations for a research colloquium at the end of the term.

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Summer 2026 Graduate Courses

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EH 590: WOMEN'S BODIES IN HISTORICAL FICTION || HALBROOKS
MW 2:30 - 5:00
FULL SUMMER TERM: JUNE 3 - JULY 31

“Nothing in man—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men,” writes Foucault. If we mentally edit this language to include women, then this becomes an even richer claim, as gender, of course, is a central aspect of the discourse of the self. Considered from this perspective, historical fiction becomes a more complex challenge than a typical costume drama might suggest. When the historical body disappears, how do we make sense of the historical subject? This course will examine how writers of historical fiction reimagine the bodies of women in the past, focusing on three novels: Lauren Groff’s Matrix, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and Toni Morrison’s A Mercy. Half of the course will be remote, as students prepare presentations for a research colloquium at the end of the term.

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Fall 2026 Undergrad Courses

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EH 300: INTRO TO LITERARY STUDY || CESARINI
MWF 1:25 - 2:15

This course offers an introduction to the study of literature, with special emphasis on critical writing. We will read and study a range of literary texts, treating each as a case study in the interpretive issues that most concern students of English. Such issues include genre, close reading, contextual reading, and the theoretical underpinnings of our common but diverse enterprise. In addition to weekly in-class assignments, students will write three short essays, and will take a final exam.

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EH 320: SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS || HILLYER
TR 2:00 - 3:15

We will be studying Shakespeare’s best work in the four kinds of plays he wrote: comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances.  This means we will be getting to know such varied characters as the gleeful villain Richard III, the maverick jester Sir John Falstaff, and the endlessly brooding introvert Hamlet. Assigned writing will consist of two short papers, a midterm, and a final exam.  

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EH 354: THE 19TH-CENTURY BRITISH NOVEL || HARRINGTON
MWF 11:15 - 12:05

The prolific periodical culture of the nineteenth century and the increasing literacy rate produced a boom in British fiction that resulted in a rich array of novels, at turns realist, domestic, Gothic, sentimental, and naturalist. In this class, we will consider issues of gender and sexuality in Austen’s Persuasion, Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Dickens’s Great Expectations, Doyle’s “The Sign of Four,” Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Discussion topics will include childhood and development, rights and reform, class, race, and empire. 

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EH 362: AMERICAN NOVEL FROM 1900 TO 1945 || RACZKOWSKI
MWF 12:20 - 1:10

U.S. culture and literature between 1900 and 1945 is often considered in terms of the historical experience of crisis and shock: Anarchists! Riots! World War! Women's Suffrage! Market Crash! World War. Again! In this course we will reflect on how a sense of historical crisis and the shock of the new differently animates the fiction of authors like William Faulkner, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Nella Larsen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Anita Loos.

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EH 371: APPROACHES TO ENGLISH GRAMMAR (W) || BEASON
MWF 11:15 - 12:05

So what is a dangling participle anyway?  EH 371 offers students a valuable intellectual and practical skill: the ability to analyze and describe in technical terms how a given sentence is structured (beyond just saying it does or doesn’t “flow”).  While the course was originally developed for students planning to teach English courses at the secondary level, EH 371 is useful for just about anyone wanting to edit, write, analyze literary texts, teach non-native speakers of English, practice law, or learn more about the English language. EH 371 is also a W-course and can help fulfill the W-course requirement for English majors and many other students.

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EH 372: TECHNICAL WRITING (W) || BEASON
MWF 10:10 - 11:00

How can you effectively convey specialized or technical information in the workplace—to readers whose expertise with this information can vary greatly? Whether your field of study deals with health care, the sciences, the computer industry, the liberal arts, or almost any field of study, this course can assist you with varied types of workplace writing and editing. EH 372 can also help satisfy the W-requirement and count as an English elective for most English majors and minors.

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EH 372: TECHNICAL WRITING (W) || GUZY
MWF 9:05 - 9:55

The purpose of this course is to train students in the kinds of written reports required of practicing professionals, aiming to improve mastery of the whole process of report writing from conceptual stage through editing stage. This course will introduce you to types of written and oral communication used in workplace settings, with a focus on technical reporting and editing. Through several document cycles, you will develop skills in managing the organization, development, style, and visual format of various documents.

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EH 373: WRITING IN THE PROFESSIONS (W) || BEASON
MWF 1:25 - 2:15

What does it mean to “write on the job,” and how is it different from college writing? This W-Course is intended for students in diverse majors. It also counts as an "English elective" for most English majors and minors. The goal is to prepare you to write in one or more professions. To do so, we focus on three elements: (1) “generic” workplace-writing skills; (2) rhetorical analysis of workplaces; (3) and practice in writing and critiquing documents.

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EH 391: FICTION WRITING || CULLITY
TR 3:30 - 4:45

In this class, we will read some fantastic short stories and write drafts of our own short stories. Workshops will offer us a safe space to explore our drafts. Our workshops are private spaces to work together as a team to help us all get our work to their next best versions. We will work towards publication, learning where we can submit our work. Come prepared to write and write! Questions? Please contact jcullity@southalabama.edu.  

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EH 395: POETRY WRITING || JORGENSEN
MWF 2:30 - 3:20

This course is an intensive study in poetic form, with a specific focus on the line, stanza arrangements, and fixed forms. Readings will include both theoretical texts and a broad range of example poems to serve as inspiration for students’ work. Workshops are a primary component of the class.

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EH 401: TEACHING COMPOSITION (W) || GUZY
MWF 1:25 - 2:15

This course will introduce you to theories of composition and their applications for teaching writing at the secondary school level. In a seminar-style format, you will:

• read and discuss the required texts,
• lead a discussion on a journal article from English Journal or Voices from the Middle,
• practice evaluating student essays, 
• demonstrate a 30- to 50-minute writing lesson, and 
• design a composition syllabus or detailed composition unit that is supported by a research-based rationale.

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EH 422: LITERARY THEORY (W) || ST. CLAIR
TR 3:30 - 4:45

The single most important course an English major could possibly take, EH 422 provides an introduction to the critical, cultural, and linguistic theories that define the discipline. Take this course and finally learn how to read! Five stars on Amazon. 4.8 on TripAdvisor. Not sold in stores. Void where prohibited.

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EH 482: AMERICAN LITERATURE - STRANGE RELIGION || McLAUGHLIN
TR 12:30 - 1:45

This course will explore the impact of religion on American literature from the 17th through the 21th centuries. To see the highs and lows of our spotted religious history, we will read Charles Brockton Brown’s Wieland, Harold Frederick’s The Damnation of Theron Ware, and William Dean Howell’s The Leatherwood God—among other novels. We will also view 20th and 21st century films such as The Apostle, There Will Be Blood, and Holy Ghost People.

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EH 483: ADVANCED FICTION WRITING || CULLITY
T 6:00 - 8:30

The goal of this class is to introduce you to writing in a longer form than short fiction or poetry or essays allow. We will scaffold complete novels and workshop the first chapters of each novel manuscript together. Core to this course’s aims is the development of critical capacities as well as a solid sense of invention and intervention. This class will take you to the next level in developing creative work.

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EH 490: AFRICAN AMERICAN LIT TO 1900 || VRANA
TR 2:00 - 3:15

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American writers were among the most important pioneers helping to forge our nation’s literary traditions, so why are they often overlooked? EH 490/591 will examine this question through works that are vital to early Black literary history and all American history, including poetry by revolutionary voices like Phillis Wheatley and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, autobiographies by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, and fiction.

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EH 491: HYBRID FORMS || JORGENSEN
M 6:00 - 8:30

This course explores the various hybrid forms: the prose poem, lyric essay, and verse novel— among many others. By looking at the conventions that cross genre-lines in hybrid forms, writers come to better understand the genres in which they regularly work. The hybrid forms studied will include elements of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and visual art. Students will also have the opportunity to workshop pieces written in the forms studied. 

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Fall 2026 Graduate Courses

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EH 502: GRADUATE WRITING FOR ENGLISH || McLAUGHLIN
W 6:00 - 8:30

EH 502 is required of all M.A. students in their first year of course work. The central purpose of this course is to prepare students for research and academic writing at the graduate level, but it also aims to prepare students for direct engagement with the academic conversations, discourses, and practices that circulate around and through the study of literary texts—in this case, the filmic texts of auteurs who handle sound and vision in unique ways.

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EH 505: TEACHING COLLEGE WRITING || SHAW
MW 2:30 - 3:45

This course examines issues in composition history, theory, and pedagogy in the context of teaching first-year composition.  Students will use this knowledge to develop course material appropriate to teaching first-year composition.  Topics include syllabus and assignment design, lesson planning, course management, teaching in the linguistically and culturally diverse classroom, and assessment. Pre-requisite / Co-requisite: EH 502. 

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EH 520: STUDIES IN SHAKESPEARE || HILLYER
R 6:00 - 8:30

The centerpiece of this course will be Shakespeare’s comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor, often classified as the most realistic of all his plays.  We will contextualize it in three different ways.  First, we will track the emergence of the play’s comedic butt (Sir John Falstaff) over the course of Shakespeare’s second tetralogy (Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, Henry V).  Next, we will watch Orson Welles’s brilliant Falstaff-themed film Chimes at Midnight.  Finally, we will ponder selected chapters from Erich Auerbach’s classic Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.  

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EH 551: AFRICAN AMERICAN LIT TO 1900 || VRANA
TR 2:00 - 3:15

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American writers were among the most important pioneers helping to forge our nation’s literary traditions, so why are they often overlooked? EH 490/591 will examine this question through works that are vital to early Black literary history and all American history, including poetry by revolutionary voices like Phillis Wheatley and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, autobiographies by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, and fiction. 

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EH 572: MODERN AMERICAN FICTION || RACZKOWSKI
T 6:00 - 8:30

The modernist novel in the United States was never singular, but took on a number of forms ranging from the experimental or “high” modernism of Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner; to the popular modernism of Anita Loos; to the Harlem Renaissance modernism of Nella Larsen and Rudolph Fisher. As a study of modernist fiction in America, the goal of this class will be to introduce students to some of these different modernisms while keeping an eye on the competing aesthetic and political arguments that modernist writers structured implicitly in their fiction and explicitly in their manifestoes, reviews and literary criticism.

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EH 583/4: GRADUATE FICTION WRITING WORKSHOP I/II || CULLITY
T 6:00 - 8:30

The goal of this class is to introduce you to writing in a longer form than short fiction or poetry or essays allow. We will scaffold complete novels and workshop the first chapters of each novel manuscript together. Core to this course’s aims is the development of critical capacities as well as a solid sense of invention and intervention. This class will take you to the next level in developing creative work.

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EH 591: HYBRID FORMS || JORGENSEN
M 6:00 - 8:30

This course explores the various hybrid forms: the prose poem, lyric essay, and verse novel— among many others. By looking at the conventions that cross genre-lines in hybrid forms, writers come to better understand the genres in which they regularly work. The hybrid forms studied will include elements of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and visual art. Students will also have the opportunity to workshop pieces written in the forms studied. 

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