Spring 2026 Elective Course Descriptions
ENGL 128 | Studies in Black Literature | MWF 11:00-11:50AM | Nix
In this course, we will conduct a textual and cultural study of African American writing from the 17th century to present-day. The theme for this course is “Black Visions of the American Dream.” In the poem “Harlem” by Langston Hughes, the speaker asks, “What happens to a dream deferred?” We will discuss the concept of the American Dream and how African American writers and creatives depicted this dream from the perspective of the Black experience. For African Americans, the process of (re)defining the American Dream has included protesting a nightmare of prejudice, attack, exclusion, and racism. This is an interdisciplinary course that will analyze novel excerpts, short stories, historical documents, speeches, movies/documentaries, visual art, music, and material culture. Our goal in this course is to illustrate the numerous ways Black Americans have championed to make America their own homeland.
Attributes: Africana Studies Minor, Solidarity & Kinship Flag, GDST Race and Ethnicity Conc, Gender & Diversity Studies, Humanities Elective
ENGL 202 | Intro to Creative Writing | MWF 1:00-1:50PM | Renzi
In this course, you will write non-fiction, prose, drama, and poetry; while doing so, I will ask you to experiment with a wide variety of styles and approaches. You will also explore the craft and concerns of writers from diverse traditions through reading assignments and writing prompts. We will practice the pleasures of reading and writing as we read our class texts—both those we read from outside our classroom and those we write ourselves. Throughout, we’ll develop and honor our particular voices, experiences, and imaginations. This is not only a class on the craft of writing; it is also a location to learn about each other through our narratives and our processes of linguistic rhythm and meaning making.
This course’s emphasis, as an introductory creative writing course, will be on the exploration and development of writing skills. We will revise and polish, but much of your time will be spent producing bits of writing that you can then, after this course, use as fodder for further projects. Thus, you will be asked to do many exercises and share your work often with your peers throughout the course.
Attributes: Creative Perspectives, Humanities Elective, Writing Flag Core
ENGL 310 | Creative Writing: Fiction | Bassett
This is a workshop in fiction, though “workshop” may be too small a word. We will read stories and novels privately, but also read them aloud together, and sometimes take them with us on long walks together.
We will watch films that comply with and disobey the rules of plot. We will hold salons where each person brings some oddity—an image, an anecdote, a clipping—to spark writing.
On certain days, class will convene outside, on a hill, a garden, a café, a church, a parking lot. We will practice listening as carefully as we write.
Each student will write stories and practice ways of seeing: how to recognize strangeness, how to sharpen attention, how to sit silently until silence yields something unexpected.
Our gatherings will be both serious and unserious, rigorous and mischievous. Expect assignments that ask you to move through the city, copy other writers (steal form!) write by hand in the dark, or compose with an ear to style (word-music).
Crying and clowning are equally welcome. Pensive contemplation and deep thinking, yes, but also loud laughter and light-mindedness.
The aim is not perfection, but the cultivation of your own peculiar practice of fiction, carried out in company, over the course of a semester that will be part study, part nonsense, part wandering.
Attributes: Creative Perspectives, Humanities Elective, Writing Flag Core
ENGL 359 | Race, Gender & Film Theory | TR 10:00-11:15AM | Wyett
This course will involve critical study of race, gender, sexuality and their intersections in American Hollywood and independent films with a particular emphasis on applying contemporary critical theories to film. We will focus on how images, identities, and values are constructed and their subsequent cultural significance and power. We will not only view, discuss and write about films with an eye to specific cinematic techniques, but also read and respond to a great deal of contemporary theory about race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in film studies.
This course fulfills several curricular requirements:
- The required theory course for English majors
- The required intersectionality course (“A 300-level course that explores both the social construction of identity and multiple axes of identity and difference, taking into consideration the various ways they may interrelate or intersect”) for Gender and Diversity Studies majors and minors
- A gender/sexuality or race/ethnicity course for Integrated Language Arts Secondary Education certification students
- An elective for English majors and minors
- A Humanities Elective for the Xavier Core Curriculum
- The Solidarity & Kinship Flag for the Xavier Core Curriculum
ENGL 370 | Queer Literature | MWF 1:00-1:50PM | Yandell
This course focuses on literature in three major categories: works by authors who are part of the lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender/queer community, works that depict characters from the lgbtq community, and works that have served as rallying cries for lgbtq readers. These categories often overlap, and their borders are typically not clearly marked (we retroactively assign “homosexual” identities to authors for whom the term might have been meaningless, for example). Novels, plays, short stories, and films will be supplemented with articles on queer literary theory as well as a larger primer on Gay Studies. Student writing will consist largely of literary criticism on the primary sources.
Attributes: Solidarity & Kinship Flag, Gender & Diversity Studies, GDST Women and Gender Conc, Humanities Elective
ENGL 462 | Victorian Writing | MWF 10:00-10:50AM | Renzi
Victorian Writing—Documenting Realities: Sex, Money, Medicine and the City.
In this course, we’ll focus on the aesthetic movement of realism and documentary to study the emergence, within the Victorian period, of writing (and images) based on documenting realities (largely urban, lower-class, Black, and women’s experiences) for readers/viewers. We’ll treat some Victorian-era photography alongside nonfiction (London Labour and the London Poor (Mahyew)), autobiography (Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (Seacole)), and fiction (Liza of Lambeth (Maugham)), and we’ll use primary source materials engaged with medicine and hygiene, workhouses and slums, infanticide and unwed motherhood, sex work, and welfare advocacy to contextualize our readings. Course will culminate in a digital mapping project “redocumenting” London realities from the period readings and study we’ll do.
Attributes: Humanities Elective
ENGL 480 | American Revolutions | TR 2:30-3:45PM | Windon
If revolutions are attempts to more fully realize the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality—which is how we will define them in this course—then the War for Independence was the first, but not the only, revolution in the United States. We will explore American revolutions in all of their plurality: from ship mutinies to slave insurrections, from the women’s rights movement to abolitionism, and from the Haitian Revolution to the Civil War. Our readings will be varied and wide-ranging, though we will pay particular attention to founding documents that articulate grievances and assert rights, including the Haitian Declaration of Independence; interpretations of the American Constitution, as well as William Lloyd Garrison’s public burning of it; the Declaration of Sentiments produced by the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls; the Constitution of the Confederate States created in opposition to the Union; and John Brown’s Provisional Constitution. Studying American revolutions through the texts that instigated them and the stories that accompanied them provides us with an opportunity to think about how the stories we tell about our revolutionary past affect our present.
Attributes: Humanities Elective
ENGL 499 | Senior Seminar: Conspiracy Theories | MWF 12:00-12:50PM | Bassett
This course examines conspiracy theories not as partisan talking points but as a distinctly American mode of storytelling and knowledge-making. We will approach conspiracy theory as an alternative epistemology and history—one that questions “official” truths. From UFO sightings and JFK assassination theories to TikTok-fueled speculations and cryptids like Bigfoot, these narratives reveal more than just paranoia: they illuminate anxieties about surveillance, exploitation, deceit, and the erosion of personal autonomy.
By situating conspiracy theories within broader contexts of politics, history, and popular media, this course will treat them as counter-narratives that shape how individuals and communities understand and imagine truth and power.
The reading and viewing list ranges from literary works by Pynchon, DeLillo, Atwood, Vonnegut, and Whitehead to nonfiction and criticism by Hofstadter, Barkun, Fenster, and Klein, as well as films, television episodes, and podcasts that have shaped American conspiracy culture.
Students will engage critically with primary sources (texts, films, online media) as well as scholarly work on literary form, politics, history, cultural studies.
Because this is the senior seminar—the capstone course for English majors at Xavier—students will be expected to draw on the wide range of skills they have developed throughout the major: interpretation, concept-creation, historical and theoretical framing, and research. The course will function as a true seminar: significant student contributions to class discussion are required, alongside substantial independent work. Course requirements will include two short analytical essays; a group presentation; individual presentations on primary and secondary texts; and an extensive research project (abstract, annotated bibliography, draft, and final thesis or creative work).
Attributes: Humanities Elective