Fall 2026 Course Descriptions
English Program and Writing Program
Penn State Abington
ENGLISH MAJOR REQUIREMENTS:
- ENGL 200 or 201: ENGL 201
- Pre-1800: ENGL 447
- Post-1800: ENGL 401, ENGL 402
- Literature, Writing, or Rhetoric: ENGL 050, ENGL 131, ENGL 191, ENGL 201, ENGL 212, ENGL 215, ENGL 233N, ENGL 229, ENGL 262, ENGL 401, ENGL 402, ENGL 412, ENGL 415, ENGL 420, ENGL 474
- Diversity: ENGL 401, ENGL 474
- Senior Seminar: ENGL 487W
WRITING MINOR COURSES: ENGL 050, ENGL 212, ENGL 215, ENGL 412, ENGL 415, ENGL 420, ENGL 474
ENGLISH MINOR COURSES: ENGL 050, ENGL 131, ENGL 191, ENGL 201, ENGL 212, ENGL 215, ENGL 233N, ENGL 229, ENGL 262, ENGL 401, ENGL 402, ENGL 412, ENGL 415, ENGL 420, ENGL 474, ENGL 487W
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 in an exercise of imagination and perseverance. ENGL 050 welcomes all students interested in creative writing: no previous creative-writing experience is necessary.
ENGL 131: Weird Tales (GH)
Professor Archer
Love a good ghost story? Enjoy being terrified? Indulge yourself this fall. This course provides an introduction to a broad range of literary works that deal with horror and the supernatural. Drawing on the etymology of the word “weird,” whose roots lie with the Old English term “Wyrd” (meaning fate), this course emphasizes readings where fate plays a significant role. From Lovecraft’s Dagon, to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, to Shelley’s Frankenstein, elements of horror and the otherworldly often contribute directly to the lives of the characters we meet and, in many cases, their untimely demise. This course welcomes all critical approaches and is likewise dedicated to exploring prominent themes in Gothic Studies. Assessment includes weekly quizzes and two essay assignments. Film selections will also be included. Join us...if you dare!
ENGL 191: Science Fiction (GH)
Professor Walters
What can science fiction tell us about who we are–and hope to be–as a species? A culture? A nation? This course will explore these questions through the study of various works of science fiction. This class introduces students to the major themes, conventions, and historical developments of science fiction from the nineteenth century to the present. We will explore how sci-fi reflects cultural anxieties and aspirations about technology, human identity, artificial intelligence, and the future. Our class materials will be varied: they include short stories, novels, and films that represent key moments in science fiction’s cultural and historical evolution. Throughout, we will examine how sci-fi engages with issues of race, gender, empire, and the tenuous limits of the human. Note that ENGL 191 is on the approved course list for the AI and Society Certificate.
ENGL 201: What is Literature (GH)
Professor Naydan
What is literature and how does it work? How do literary texts differ from supposedly non-literary ones? What forms does literature take and why do these forms matter? And how do we go about investigating the wide range of possible meanings that literary texts may have? This course will focus on these among other questions about the nature and features of literature. It will familiarize students with theories and practices that are foundational to studying different kinds of literary texts and contexts. Specifically, we will focus on post-1945 U.S. literature written in different genres, namely a novel, a novella, a memoir, a play, short stories, and poetry. Authors will likely include Alison Bechdel, Don DeLillo, Ling Ma, Thomas Pynchon, Claudia Rankine, and others. We will also read a handful of brief works by critical theorists to gain insight into the different kinds of lenses we might bring to literary works and the world. Through reading and writing about literature and critical theory, we will acquire technical vocabularies used by literature scholars and literary historians. We will also develop an understanding of how literary works operate and how responsible scholars can and do make meaning of them.
ENGL 212 (GA)
Professor Pack Introduction to Fiction Writing
Our ENGL. 212 class will explore the writing of fiction in two forms— the short-short and the short story. Students will peer review one another’s writing in a workshop environment where feedback will offer close readings of narrative in a safe, equitable environment that nurtures talent and creativity. Students will supplement their own creative works by reading established American writers from the mid-20th Century to our current time. Fiction created for this class will be submitted to Penn State Abington’s literary and arts magazine The Abington Review for publication in the 2027 edition of the magazine.
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 223N: Shakespeare: Page, Stage, and Screen (IL, GA, GH, Interdomain)
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 229: Digital Studies (GH)
(Stacked with DIGIT 100 Introduction to Digital Humanities)
Professor Nicosia
This course will introduce students to concepts, methods, and resources for digital studies and the digital humanities, meaning both the study of culture using digital means and the study of digital culture and digital cultural objects in themselves. In some cases, digitization and digital production enrich existing approaches to English studies; in other cases, they present new paradigms and practices, requiring the cultivation of new analytic and theoretical approaches along with new technical skills. Accordingly, the course will emphasize both that enrichment of existing approaches to English studies, in the use of computers to present and analyze English-language materials preserved in the past, and the application of computing to the creation of expressive cultural artifacts unique to networked and programmable media. This course will challenge you to experiment with new techniques, and students who are resourceful, creative, and energetic will find this course an ideal forum to test their curiosity and inquisitiveness.
The central project of this course will be to create a student-generated transcription of a digitized cookery manuscript held at Penn State Libraries Eberly Family Special Collections. For the first ten-weeks of the course, we will collaboratively transcribe a manuscript and discuss readings about digital studies, debates in the digital humanities, recipe manuscripts, cookery and medicine, and labor and digital projects to understand both our object of study and how we have come to interact with it today. During the final five weeks of the course, students will work individually or in teams on multimodal projects that research, curate, and share our collective knowledge about the manuscript.
ENGL 262: Reading Fiction—Urban Fictions of New York City and Los Angeles (GH)
Professor Heise
In this course, you will collaborate with students in an urban-studies course at the University of Freiburg in Germany through an EDGE (Experimental Digital Global Engagement) project focused on city literature, culture, and space. “Cities are not simply material or lived spaces – they are spaces of the imagination,” Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson remind us. This course examines how post‑1950 American literature has imagined New York City and Los Angeles as twin, and often competing, visions of a multiethnic and multiracial democracy. Long functioning as symbolic crucibles for the making and unmaking of individual and collective identities, these cities have inspired writers to respond with wonder and dread, utopian longing and dystopian critique. We will study how literature characterizes New York and Los Angeles as sites of political and personal freedom as well as exclusion. Readings will explore how writers depict urban communities and spatial forms, and how they negotiate racial, sexual, gender, and class encounters within each city’s diverse and often contested spaces. The course situates these representations within broader economic transformations—from the decline of the Fordist city to the rise of the post‑Fordist metropolis—while also attending closely to the local: the built environment and the intertwined issues of segregation, housing, violence, gentrification, and immigration. Together, these texts reveal how American literature has used New York and Los Angeles to probe the promises and failures of urban life in the modern United States. This course is stacked with ENGL 402. If you need a Post-1800 course as an English Major, ENGL 402 will satisfy the requirement.
ENGL 401: Genre Play
Professor Naydan
What happens when a comic is also a tragedy, when a novel is also a play, or when an essay is also a questionnaire? To what degree are our literary taxonomies helpful or restrictive and how do authors operate within, between, and in spite of them? How do the lines that divide literary forms and forms in general speak to the political and social lines that divide humans from one another in twenty-first century life? ENGL 401/487W: Genre Play in Twenty-first Century Literature (3 credits) explores the ways in which U.S. authors and authors writing about the U.S. or aspects of U.S. culture leverage, mesh, and otherwise engage in literary play with genres in their works of contemporary U.S. literature. Through reading, discussing, and writing about a diverse group of authors’ works, we’ll familiarize ourselves with the aesthetics, rhetoric, and politics of genre play. We’ll also develop an understanding of identities that are subject to categorization in ways that are evocative of the categories that the corporate market, writers, and readers may impose on literary texts. Authors will likely include Jennifer Egan, Mohsin Hamid, Valeria Luiselli, Claudia Rankine, and Gary Shteyngart. By the end of this semester, students will be able to conduct close readings of contemporary literature; make historically and culturally informed arguments about literary texts; write about literature via a process-approach to writing; incorporate secondary sources into writing effectively; and write in different genres common to humanities disciplines, most notably literary analyses and blogs. Please note that this course is stacked with ENGL 487W. Students enrolled in ENGL 487W (the senior seminar) will have slightly higher expectations for research than students enrolled in ENGL 401.
ENGL 402: Literature and Society—Urban Fictions of New York City and Los Angeles
Professor Heise
In this course, you will collaborate with students in an urban-studies course at the University of Freiburg in Germany through an EDGE (Experimental Digital Global Engagement) project focused on city literature, culture, and space. “Cities are not simply material or lived spaces – they are spaces of the imagination,” Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson remind us. This course examines how post‑1950 American literature has imagined New York City and Los Angeles as twin, and often competing, visions of a multiethnic and multiracial democracy. Long functioning as symbolic crucibles for the making and unmaking of individual and collective identities, these cities have inspired writers to respond with wonder and dread, utopian longing and dystopian critique. We will study how literature characterizes New York and Los Angeles as sites of political and personal freedom as well as exclusion. Readings will explore how writers depict urban communities and spatial forms, and how they negotiate racial, sexual, gender, and class encounters within each city’s diverse and often contested spaces. The course situates these representations within broader economic transformations—from the decline of the Fordist city to the rise of the post‑Fordist metropolis—while also attending closely to the local: the built environment and the intertwined issues of segregation, housing, violence, gentrification, and immigration. Together, these texts reveal how American literature has used New York and Los Angeles to probe the promises and failures of urban life in the modern United States. This course is stacked with ENGL 262.
ENGL 412: Advanced Fiction Writing
Professor Pack
Our ENGL. 412 class will explore the writing of fiction in two forms— the short-short and the short story. Students will peer review one another’s writing in a workshop environment where feedback will offer close readings of narrative in a safe, equitable environment that nurtures talent and creativity. Students will supplement their own creative works by reading established American writers from the mid-20th Century to our current time. Fiction created for this class will be submitted to Penn State Abington’s literary and arts magazine The Abington Review for publication in the 2027 edition of the magazine.
ENGL 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 Travers
This course focuses on the analysis and composition of informative, persuasive, and “creative” web-based texts. You’ll analyze and write for various audiences and purposes on the web. Learn how to organize and write for readers more likely to scan through or locate specific information than read word for word. You’ll also learn how some information may be better expressed via clear graphics or videos and use various tools and platforms to create multimedia content (may include Adobe Express, Google Sites, WordPress, Sway, Wix, and Medium). Throughout the course you will add to an online writing portfolio featuring your skills in writing for the web. Note that this semester the course will be delivered in Zoom synchronous mode.
ENGL 447: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century
Professor Rigilano
This course will explore the concept and genre of utopia in British literature, from the early modern period to the end of 18th century. We tend to think of utopia as a frictionless paradise, but from its inception the idea of a perfect place was riven by paradox. Utopian literature takes up the contradictions of collective life and foregrounds the political and social process of working through them. Moreover, the idea of Utopia is not static or eternal: every historical moment imagines utopia anew. The core primary texts in this course will include Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall, and Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred (1772). We will also consider a variety of other historical texts and contemporary theoretical considerations of the genre. As a 400-level course, our class sessions will usually consist of discussion, punctuated periodically by short lectures. We will also write frequently in response to our readings. You will be assigned four short response papers, two major papers, and a critical presentation.
ENGL 474: Issues in Rhetoric and Composition: Rhetorics of Health and Medicine
Professor Cohen
This course will explore the social dimensions of scientific inquiry, especially relating to the cultural and persuasive aspects of the practice of medicine. We will focus on sites where medical practice is shaped by language, including the diagnostic interview, the creation and distribution of treatment protocols, and perceptions of virtue and risk as applied to pharmaceuticals. We will read the work of prominent theorists in the field of Rhetorics of Health and Medicine, examine genres that circulate in medical practice, and analyze texts that circulate in popular culture, such as pharmaceutical ads. We will aim to discover how current rhetorical theory can illuminate our interactions with the field, policy, and practitioners of healthcare in the US, including how these interactions are influenced by issues of race, disability, gender identity, sexuality, and socioeconomic status.
ENGL 487W: Senior Seminar / Genre Play
Professor Naydan
What happens when a comic is also a tragedy, when a novel is also a play, or when an essay is also a questionnaire? To what degree are our literary taxonomies helpful or restrictive and how do authors operate within, between, and in spite of them? How do the lines that divide literary forms and forms in general speak to the political and social lines that divide humans from one another in twenty-first century life? ENGL 401/487W: Genre Play in Twenty-first Century Literature (3 credits) explores the ways in which U.S. authors and authors writing about the U.S. or aspects of U.S. culture leverage, mesh, and otherwise engage in literary play with genres in their works of contemporary U.S. literature. Through reading, discussing, and writing about a diverse group of authors’ works, we’ll familiarize ourselves with the aesthetics, rhetoric, and politics of genre play. We’ll also develop an understanding of identities that are subject to categorization in ways that are evocative of the categories that the corporate market, writers, and readers may impose on literary texts. Authors will likely include Jennifer Egan, Mohsin Hamid, Valeria Luiselli, Claudia Rankine, and Gary Shteyngart. By the end of this semester, students will be able to conduct close readings of contemporary literature; make historically and culturally informed arguments about literary texts; write about literature via a process-approach to writing; incorporate secondary sources into writing effectively; and write in different genres common to humanities disciplines, most notably literary analyses and blogs. Please note that this course is stacked with ENGL 401. Students enrolled in ENGL 487W (the senior seminar) will have slightly higher expectations for research than students enrolled in ENGL 401.
HUM 101: Transformative Texts Part 1: Foundational Knowledge (IL, GH)
Professor Nicosia
This course offers an introduction to transformative texts from around the world. Students will learn foundational knowledge from various disciplines in the humanities and arts, while developing basic interpretive, close-reading, writing, communication, and critical-thinking skills. This first course of the Keystone sequence engages students with core texts and arts-based materials from antiquity to the modern era, offering a roadmap of disciplinary, interdisciplinary, historical, cultural, and aesthetic perspectives within which to contextualize interpretation. Students will read texts from a variety of humanities disciplines alongside appropriate historical context to learn how ideas transformed, and were transformed, by social, economic, political, and historical events and institutions. The course supports open dialogue and critical engagement among students and faculty, to promote curiosity, reflexivity, and mindfulness, while cultivating the spirit of life-long learning. Students will learn about the value of the humanities and the arts in the context of its historical, sociopolitical, cultural, and global contributions.
