While all sections of the same ENGL course teach students the same set of reading and writing skills, the specific texts students read and discuss in each section depend on the instructor’s area of expertise and interests. Often, instructors choose their texts based on a particular theme or topic. Below is a list describing all the themed sections of literature and academic writing that will be offered during the Winter 2027 term. If a section does not appear below, it's because it has not been identified as one with a unifying theme or topic.
For scheduling information about both the themed sections listed below and all other sections of English offered by the department, please refer to the browse classes tool.
For more information about the instructors teaching these sections and others, please see the English Department's faculty profile page.
First-Year Courses
In this course students will read, discuss and write about at least one major theme in literature and culture, such as crime and punishment, gender roles, immigrant experiences, or paradise lost. Texts studied will be drawn from at least two literary genres.
Topics
Nancy Earle
Friendship has been described as “an institutionless institution.” As the literary critic Gregory Jusdanis observes, friendship is “a legally, religiously, and economically inconsequential affiliation. There is no fixed beginning or end of friendship, no rite celebrating its appearance, and no covenant sealing its existence.” At its most basic level, all friendship seems to demand of us is our empathy—our willingness to imagine and engage with the thoughts and feelings of another—and our time. For these reasons, Jusdanis intriguingly suggests, friendship may in fact have a lot on common with the act of reading.
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Liz McCausland
Embodying Gender
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Ryan Miller
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Leni Robinson
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In this course, students will read, discuss and write about fiction. Texts assigned will emphasize a variety of genres, such as realism, fantasy, mystery and romance, and may reflect significant developments in the history of fiction.
Topics
Noëlle Phillips
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Ryan Stephenson
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In this course students will read, interpret and write about plays as literature, including elements of stagecraft and performance. Plays assigned may emphasize a variety of genres (such as tragedy, comedy, the one-act play, the dramatic monologue) and may reflect significant developments in the history of theatre, from its beginnings to the present.
Topics
Jason Bourget
In this section of ENGL 1115, we will explore how drama allows us to explore politics, philosophy, and identity. Starting with Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV and then moving on to more contemporary plays, we will discuss how theatre lets us work through concerns about political legitimacy, examine the relationship between politics and violence, interrogate connections between identity and ethnicity, and speculate about the meaning and value of a life lived. While we have this wide-ranging discussion, we will also spend some time thinking about how plays are performed on stage and adapted to media such as film and television.
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This course introduces students to the process of writing academic argument papers, and to strategies, assignments and exercises that develop their abilities as researchers, readers and writers of scholarly prose. Students will examine the general principles of composition, and the specific conventions of academic writing as practiced in several disciplines, particularly in the arts and humanities. Students will gain experience in locating, evaluating and using sources within their own writing.
Sections Focused on Specific Topics
Jason Bourget
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Noëlle Phillips
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Leni Robinson
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Ryan Stephenson Personal, Social, and Global Health
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Admission to second-year English courses is open to all students who have taken any two university-transfer first-year English literature courses, or one university-transfer first-year English literature course and one university-transfer first-year Creative Writing or English writing course.