Spring 2026 Course Descriptions
English Program and Writing Program
Penn State Abington
ENGLISH MAJOR REQUIREMENTS:
- ENGL 200 or 201: ENGL 201
- Pre-1800: ENGL 403, ENGL 455
- Post-1800: ENGL 401, ENGL 428, ENGL 452
- Literature, Writing, or Rhetoric: ENGL 002, ENGL 050, ENGL 140H, ENGL 144, ENGL 183N, ENGL 184, ENGL 201, ENGL 211, ENGL 215, ENGL 221W, ENGL 222, ENGL 223N, ENGL 401, ENGL 403, ENGL 415, ENGL 420, ENGL 428, ENGL 435, ENGL 452, ENGL 455, ENGL 471
- Diversity: ENGL 428, ENGL 455, ENGL 471
- Senior Seminar: ENGL 487W
WRITING MINOR COURSES: ENGL 050, ENGL 211, ENGL 215, ENGL 415, ENGL 420, ENGL 471
ENGLISH MINOR COURSES: ENGL 002, ENGL 050, ENGL 140H, ENGL 144, ENGL 183N, ENGL 184, ENGL 201, ENGL 211, ENGL 215, ENGL 221W, ENGL 222, , ENGL 223N, ENGL 401, ENGL 403, ENGL 415, ENGL 420, ENGL 428, ENGL 435, ENGL 452, ENGL 455, ENGL 471, ENGL 487W
ENGL 002: Great Traditions in English Literature (IL, GH) Professor Walters
What do Anglo-Saxon riddles, translated French chivalric Romances, Shakespearean sonnets, slave histories, and short stories written by Pakistani immigrants in London have in common? They are all considered works of “British” literature! In this course, we will read selected pieces of British literature written over a thousand year period. An island nation state that was conquered--but also conquered others--Britain and its overseas empire has produced some of the most diverse and exciting writing in human history. This course provides an historical and thematic overview of many of the texts that have come to constitute the so-called canon of British literature. Together, we will examine several works of British literature, establishing them within their larger, historical, social, and geopolitical contexts. We will discuss literary texts as both the products and constituters of culture at large. Throughout, we will query what, precisely, is considered literature at a given historical moment–and why. We will ask how British literature contributes to our collective understanding of what it means to be human.
ENGL 050: Introduction to Creative Writing (GA)
Professor Heise
Want to write, but aren’t quite sure how to get started or what to write about? This course is meant to ignite your interests, hone your skills, and introduce you to the foundational elements of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction so as to set free your imagination. You will learn to craft images, music, lines, and narrative in the poetry we practice. In fiction, you will learn how to create characters, develop themes, modulate tone and atmosphere, plot a conflict, and manipulate setting. And you will learn to translate and reconstruct personal experience, memory, and research into arguments, scenes, and narratives for creative nonfiction. Along the way, our conversations will turn to the writing and revision process, to why one writes in the first place, and to age-old inexhaustible questions, such as, what are the functions and purposes of poetry, short story, and the essay, what is the difference between truth and fact, and what are the ethics of writing about our own lives and the lives of others. In this course, you’re a writer. And that means you will be writing all the time in an exercise of imagination and perseverance. ENGL 050 welcomes all students interested in creative writing: no previous creative-writing experience is necessary.
ENGL 140H: Contemporary Literature (GH)
Professor Naydan
This honors course invites students to read, discuss, and write about contemporary literature, which literature scholars characterize as literature written within the last two to three decades. To ground our consideration of contemporary literature, we will focus on texts written by U.S. authors and authors who are writing about the U.S. after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Authors will likely include Alison Bechdel, Don DeLillo, Mohsin Hamid, Valeria Luiselli, Claudia Rankine, and Zadie Smith. The poetry, short fiction, essays, novels, and multi-genre texts we will address paint a picture of how diverse authors comment on evolving contemporary U.S. history, politics, and aspects of culture. We will consider subjects such as digitization, globalization, social class disparity, sexuality, racism, immigration, and political polarization. Through reading, discussing, and writing about our assigned texts, students will develop an understanding of a range of genres and stylistic features that shape the contemporary literary moment. Students will also develop an understanding of pressing issues that have come to define our times.
ENGL 144: Everyday Rhetoric (GH)
Professor Travers
Viral videos and social media posts, song lyrics, peaceful protests -- these are all examples of everyday rhetoric we may encounter. Explore these persuasive messages that may influence our beliefs and behaviors. Where are they, who produces them, and for what purposes? Learn how to critically analyze this everyday rhetoric so that you can recognize techniques and motives of the messages and messengers. ENGL 144 is stacked with ENGL 471 Rhetorical Traditions, which will explore additional content with additional assignments.
ENGL 183N The Cold War in Literature, Politics, and History (GH, IL, GS, Interdomain)
Professor Pack
At 8:15 a.m. local time in Hiroshima, Japan, the atomic bomb Little Boy was released from the Super Fortress Enola Gay. The bomb detonated 1,900 feet above the city with the resulting blast destroying everything within a one-mile radius of the epicenter. Estimates state that approximately 70% of the buildings in Hiroshima were destroyed. Conservative estimates put the total deaths at about 130,000. As the now iconic mushroom cloud rose over the Japanese landscape, so, too, did the specter of nuclear annihilation rise over the whole of the planet. After the subsequent bombing of Nagasaki just three days later, it became apparent to the entire world that the days of direct combat between world powers may well be over, and that a new age of unprecedented potential destruction was set to begin. It was the dawning of the nuclear era and the start of a new type of paranoia in the mind of every citizen of the world. In our English 183N class we will study primary texts, both fiction and nonfiction, that explore how the Cold War evolved and the effects of Civil Defense on American society. We will also view films that accurately captured the tension and global fear of mutually assured destruction.
ENGL 201: What is Literature (GH)
Professor Rigilano
What is literature? Is it an objective category to which all writing of verifiably “literary” quality belongs? If so, in what does the “literary” consist? Or is it rather that literature names an ideological category that serves the interests of power? Or perhaps literature is the name we give to writing that produces a particular aesthetic experience in the reader?
In asking these questions — and many more — this course seeks to introduce students to key concepts in literary theory and literary history. Students will engage with a wide variety of texts and genres, from Gothic fiction to conceptual poetry. We will begin with the Argentinian genius Jorge Luis Borges’ mind-bending short story “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941) — a great place to start a discussion about the many labyrinths that literature confronts us with. From there, we will skip around in both time and place: we will analyze the macabre form of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), interpret the intentional ambiguities of Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” (1983), recoil in horror at Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House Usher” (1839), tease out the colonial gaze in Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Interpreter of Maladies” (1999), and much more! This class will serve as both an introduction to literary study and an investigation into its various methodologies and concepts. To accomplish this, we will oscillate between close readings that we develop in conversation and mini-lectures on movements and terms that you might not be familiar with. By the end of the semester, my hope, paradoxically, is not that you will be able to confidently answer the question “What is Literature?” — rather, it is that you will discover your own way of asking it.
ENGL 211: Introduction to Writing Studies
Professor Lee-Amuzie
This course introduces students to the field of Writing Studies, treating writing both as a practice and as an object of scholarly inquiry. We will explore key conversations within the discipline by reading and discussing works on historical and contemporary topics in rhetoric, composition theory, writing pedagogy, and applied linguistics. We'll discuss questions such as:
- How do different cultures and communities practice literacy?
- How are successful and less successful writers different in their writing processes?
- What causes writing anxiety?
- How does writing contribute to our wellbeing?
- How do writers find their voice, and how does that shape identity and authority?
- How can writing be used as a tool for activism and social change?
In addition to examining what scholars have said about these questions, you will also learn how such questions are investigated through various research methodologies. By the end of the course, you will design and propose a small-scale research study exploring a question about writing that you would like to understand more deeply.
The course emphasizes conversation, collaboration, and inquiry rather than lectures or exams. Students will engage in projects, small-group work, readings, writing, and in-depth discussions that invite them to reflect on their own writing practices, their identities as writers, and the social, cultural, and political dimensions of writing.
ENGL 215: Introduction to Article Writing
Professor Cohen
Share your perspectives on campus and community issues! In this course, you will research, compose, edit, and publish articles for our digital news outlet The Abington Sun.
Students in ENGL 215 will be expected to conduct primary research--conducting interviews and analyzing data, in order to generate ideas for stories of interest to our campus community. Students will pitch their story ideas weekly to an audience of their peers, and decide collectively with editors which stories will move forward.
Over the course of the semester, each student should plan to produce and publish several news articles and feature pieces, improving writing skills in a hands-on process as they work to publish well-researched, impactful articles. Subjects for articles range from politics to current events, sports and arts and culture. Feel free to browse past topics at The Abington Sun.
If you like to write, are interested in learning and writing about current events, and want to see your work published, ENGL 215/415 is the place for you! If you haven’t worked with us before, you should enroll in ENGL 215. If you’re a veteran of our writing staff who wants to further hone your skills, you should register for ENGL 415.
ENGL 221W: British Literature to 1798 (IL, GH, W)
Professor Nicosia
In 1492 Christopher Columbus, and his European shipmates, arrived on the shores of the Americas. 1492 also often marks the divide between the medieval era and the Renaissance as distinct literary and historical periods. However, medieval, Renaissance, and eighteenth-century authors alike depicted the known world, documented global exploration, and imagined possible places. In this course, we will read accounts of real and imaginary places described in English and American literature from the premodern era (beginnings to 1800) by authors such as Marie de France, Aphra Behn, and John Milton. Class discussions and assignments will address histories of race and colonialism, issues of gender and authorship, and utopian studies that emerge from our readings. We will use free, online textbooks for this class and the final project for the course will invite students to remix and augment these online resources for future students enrolled in the course. This course is “stacked” and has a hybrid schedule. Students can enroll in this course at an introductory level (ENGL 221W, which also fulfills a writing-intensive requirement) or at an advanced level (ENGL 455).
ENGL 222: British Literature Since 1798 (GH, IL)
Professor Walters
In this course, we will examine British literature written during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We will also focus on how the city of Philadelphia helped to shape many important ideas preoccupying British writers and thinkers in this period. This era was marked by violent revolution, class conflict, imperial expansion, and sexual upheaval. Given this, throughout this course, we will consider the complex and international nature of British identity considered in the texts we analyze. Together, we will study a variety of literary genres, such as the novel, the poem, and non-fictional prose. Moreover (funding pending) students in this class will gain experiential knowledge of how nineteenth-century social systems, such as mass incarceration and scientific racialism were part of the literal and cultural landscape of nineteenth-century Philadelphia. We will visit Eastern State Penitentiary and the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (now the Mütter Museum)--free of charge to students--because both places contributed to a transatlantic discussion about social institutions like race and the ethics of penal incarceration. In this class, students will reflect upon how these nineteenth century institutions continue to structure modern life--at large and in the Philadelphia region. ENGL 222 is “stacked” with ENGL 452. Students may enroll at the introductory or advanced level of this course. ENGL 452 will have different writing expectations than ENGL 222.
ENGL 223N: Shakespeare: Page, Stage, and Screen (IL, Interdomain, GA, GH)
Professor Nicosia
“He was not of an age but for all time!” Ben Jonson, a poet and playwright, wrote these words to celebrate the life and work of William Shakespeare. This course is designed to introduce students to Shakespeare and his world. Students of all levels are welcome and no prior experience is required or assumed. We will read six of Shakespeare’s plays, including some of his most celebrated. As we read these plays, we will analyze their genre, dramatic structure, and language as well as how they engage with social and political issues of Shakespeare’s time and our own. We will consider issues of performance, film adaptation, and publication history through interactive assignments.
ENGL 401: Studies in Genre (American Crime Fiction)
Professor Heise
This course is designed to introduce you to American crime fiction of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Far from merely an escapist literature, crime fiction offers a complex response to the difficult, contradictory experience of modernity. It is a literature of profound moral ambiguity and it is a genre that is as deeply political as it is entertaining and disturbing. The course will map this popular genre from the 1920s to the end of the century and beyond by attending to its diversity, by situating the literature within historical context, and by anatomizing how it represents ideological conflicts over crime, justice, inequality, and city life. As we make our way through the semester, we will discuss issues that this literature dramatizes, such as, the representation of alienation, anonymity, and the metropolis; the violence of American individualism; the policing of working-class and ethnic culture; and crime fiction’s cultural politics and its challenge to ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural demarcations. In addition to the primary literature, the course will engage theoretical and historical texts, which will aid in framing the genre within ongoing debates over its origins, its politics, its literary status, and its audience.
ENGL 403: Literature and Culture (Recipe Book)
Professor Nicosia
Recipe book is a term that encompasses a wide variety of manuscript books containing medicinal and culinary recipes that were produced and used in England, Europe, and America between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Amongst the cold remedies and pickled cucumbers, compilers of recipe books also wrote poems, prayers, commonplaces gathered from their reading, household accounts, elaborate decorative flourishes, and the birth, marriage, and death records of their families. In this course, we will consider the text, rhetoric, and materiality of recipe books as well as what uses we can put these documents to today. During the first part of the class, we will transcribe from and vet prior transcription of two digitized eighteenth-century recipe books in Penn State Libraries’ Eberly Family Special collections. In the second part of the course, we will use various embodied and traditional research methods to analyze the literature and how-to instructions contained in these volumes. This course has a hybrid schedule.
English 415: Advanced Nonfiction Writing
Professor Cohen
Share your perspectives on campus and community issues! In this course, you will research, compose, edit, and publish articles for our digital news outlet The Abington Sun.
Students in ENGL 415 will build on the skills they learned in ENGL 215 to conduct primary research--conducting interviews and analyzing data, in order to generate ideas for stories of interest to our campus community. Students will pitch their story ideas weekly to an audience of their peers, and decide collectively with editors which stories will move forward.
Over the course of the semester, each student should plan to produce and publish several news articles and feature pieces, improving writing skills in a hands-on process as they work to publish well-researched, impactful articles. Subjects for articles range from politics to current events, sports and arts and culture. Feel free to browse past topics at The Abington Sun.
If you like to write, are interested in learning and writing about current events, and want to see your work published, ENGL 215/415 is the place for you! If you haven’t worked with us before, you should enroll in ENGL 215. If you’re a veteran of our writing staff who wants to further hone your skills, you should register for ENGL 415.
ENGL 420: Writing for the Web
Professor Cohen
In this course, students will build writing and digital media skills as they engage in the editorial process with their own original content, which they will post to websites they design. They will also examine and exploit the affordances of various digital media in conveying messages, while interrogating the implications of the speed of circulation and the penetration of digital content into our daily lives. As part of this work, students will critically engage with the ethical complexities of the circulation of digital media and the power of publication in shaping public opinion. At the end of the course, students will have practice using a variety of tools, including AI, for content production, and be able to articulate positions on the ethical questions raised by those tools.
ENGL 428: Asian American Literatures
(Cross listed with ASIA 428)
Professor Kopacz
This course introduces students to Asian American literary and cultural productions from the mid-twentieth century through the 2020s. By engaging novels, memoirs, poetry, short stories, essays, and film, the class will examine the relationship between the social and historical contexts in which Asian American literature and culture have been produced and the impact these productions have had on our understanding of ‘Asian American’ as political identity and community formation. Throughout the semester, we will explore what it means to develop social, cultural, and political identities at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, national origin, disability, and citizenship. Course topics include: immigration, detention and incarceration, war and militarism, refugee resettlement, and transnational and transracial adoption.
ENGL 452: The Victorians
Professor Walters
In this course, we will examine British literature written during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We will also focus on how the city of Philadelphia helped to shape many important ideas preoccupying British writers and thinkers in this period. This era was marked by violent revolution, class conflict, imperial expansion, and sexual upheaval. Given this, throughout this course, we will consider the complex and international nature of British identity considered in the texts we analyze. Together, we will study a variety of literary genres, such as the novel, the poem, and non-fictional prose. Moreover (funding pending) students in this class will gain experiential knowledge of how nineteenth-century social systems, such as mass incarceration and scientific racialism were part of the literal and cultural landscape of nineteenth-century Philadelphia. We will visit Eastern State Penitentiary and the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (now the Mütter Museum)--free of charge to students--because both places contributed to a transatlantic discussion about social institutions like race and the ethics of penal incarceration. In this class, students will reflect upon how these nineteenth century institutions continue to structure modern life--at large and in the Philadelphia region. ENGL 452 is “stacked” with ENGL 222. Students may enroll at the introductory or advanced level of this course. ENGL 452 will have different writing expectations than ENGL 222.
ENGL 455: Topics in British Literature: Premodern Worlds
Professor Nicosia
In 1492 Christopher Columbus, and his European shipmates, arrived on the shores of the Americas. 1492 also often marks the divide between the medieval era and the Renaissance as distinct literary and historical periods. However, medieval, Renaissance, and eighteenth-century authors alike depicted the known world, documented global exploration, and imagined possible places. In this course, we will read accounts of real and imaginary places described in English and American literature from the premodern era (beginnings to 1800) by authors such as Marie de France, Aphra Behn, and John Milton. Class discussions and assignments will address histories of race and colonialism, issues of gender and authorship, and utopian studies that emerge from our readings. We will use free, online textbooks for this class and the final project for the course will invite students to remix and augment these online resources for future students enrolled in the course. This course is “stacked” and has a hybrid schedule. Students can enroll in this course at an introductory level (ENGL 221W) or at an advanced level ENGL 455. Students enrolled in ENGL 455 will read and deliver presentations on articles and book chapters written by literary critics and historians. ENGL 455 fulfills the diversity requirement and the “Pre-1800” requirement.
ENGL 471: Rhetorical Traditions
Professor Travers
Viral videos and social media posts, song lyrics, peaceful protests -- these are all examples of everyday rhetoric we may encounter. Explore these persuasive messages that may influence our beliefs and behaviors. Where are they, who produces them, and for what purposes? Learn how to critically analyze this everyday rhetoric so that you can recognize techniques and motives of the messages and messengers. ENGL 471 is stacked with ENGL 144 Everyday Rhetoric. ENGL 471 will also explore the rhetorical traditions influencing everyday rhetoric: Major figures and ideas of Greco-Roman rhetoric; Renaissance and Enlightenment; select modern rhetorical theories; select historical world rhetorical theories.
ENGL 487W: Senior Seminar (American Crime Fiction)
Professor Heise
This course is designed to introduce you to American crime fiction of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Far from merely an escapist literature, crime fiction offers a complex response to the difficult, contradictory experience of modernity. It is a literature of profound moral ambiguity and it is a genre that is as deeply political as it is entertaining and disturbing. The course will map this popular genre from the 1920s to the end of the century and beyond by attending to its diversity, by situating the literature within historical context, and by anatomizing how it represents ideological conflicts over crime, justice, inequality, and city life. As we make our way through the semester, we will discuss issues that this literature dramatizes, such as, the representation of alienation, anonymity, and the metropolis; the violence of American individualism; the policing of working-class and ethnic culture; and crime fiction’s cultural politics and its challenge to ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural demarcations. In addition to the primary literature, the course will engage theoretical and historical texts, which will aid in framing the genre within ongoing debates over its origins, its politics, its literary status, and its audience. Note that ENGL 487 will have different writing expectations from ENGL 401 in keeping with the demands of the senior seminar.
