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ENGL 4501: Canadian Theatre Since 1968
This seminar course will examine the ongoing emergence of uniquely Canadian forms of theatre in the years since the Massey Commission asserted the need to foster Canada鈥檚 native talent. Topics to be considered will include: the controversial role of government subsidy and policy-making in Canadian culture; the differing models offered by the Stratford and Shaw Festivals, by the major regional theatres, and by 鈥榓lternate鈥� and independent companies; the contrast between First Nations, English- and French-Canadian traditions; and the rise of the current 鈥楩ringe鈥� phenomenon. Drama by representative playwrights will be considered alongside post-colonial theory and primary sources in Canadian theatre history to help students consider what a genuinely 鈥楥anadian鈥� theatre might look like. Above all, the course offers an opportunity to consider the complex relationship between theatre and national identity: who are 鈥榳e,鈥� and how might our theatre express or even shape 鈥榰s鈥�?

ENGL 4611: Medieval Literature
This course will be a combined fourth-year & graduate seminar on gender, sexuality and sexualized violence in medieval romances, primarily from England. We will study works ranging from well-known authors such as Chaucer, Gower and Malory to more obscure romances such as Melusine and Amis and Amiloun. Each student will lead at least one seminar discussion. The English texts will be read in the original language, but no previous knowledge of Middle English is required. 

ENGL 4811: On Beauty
In E.B. White鈥檚 children鈥檚 classic, Charlotte鈥檚 Web, an erudite and compassionate spider spins words that save her friend Wilbur from the slaughterhouse. All the farmers in the neighborhood are convinced that her web is a divine miracle, not the work of an ordinary arachnid, and the local minister is happy to confirm this impression. Elaine Scarry doesn鈥檛 write about spiders or pigs in On Beauty and Being Just, but she does argue that beauty in any form increases our capacity for compassion and our inclination to justice. When her book was published some twenty-five years ago, this claim seemed startlingly out of step with the times. Scarry was already famous as the author of The Body in Pain, so the book was widely reviewed by scholars and public intellectuals alike. In general, the public intellectuals were glowing, but the scholars had doubts. Beauty was a suspect category at the time, a social construction at best and an agent of imperialism at worst. Yet in recent years, Scarry鈥檚 book has been taken up by many writers and scholars, including Jennifer C. Nash, Ocean Vuong, Chlo茅 Cooper Jones, and Saidiya Hartman. Across genres, these writers call beauty back, and they also insist on the intellectual and political value of the personal, the private, the amateur and the undisciplined. This course will investigate their work, and that of other writers who argue that beauty is not an indulgence but a mode of survival and a means of transfiguration. In that spirit, students will have the option to stretch the limits of their own writing into hybrid genres, including the narrative/personal essay.

ENGL 4876: Photography & Visual Culture
This advanced seminar brings together scholarly readings in the fields of Visual Culture and Photography Studies to examine the role of images in literary, cultural, and academic knowledge production. We will explore a range of theories and thinkers to address the following questions: how can we theorize images as forms of media and text? What is the relationship between the visual and the literary? How has visuality shaped structures of power including racial, gendered, and sexual difference? How can we 鈥渞ead鈥� visual and photographic texts in ways that interrogate and challenge those structures of power? In addition to tracing the genealogies of these fields through their intersections with Media Studies, Cultural Theory, Race and Ethnicity, and Gender and Women鈥檚 Studies, we will also explore some of the visual cultures of Halifax through primary analysis of local archives.

ENGL 4205: Women & Detective Fiction
At least since Irene Adler beat Sherlock Holmes at his own game, women have had an extensive and complicated relationship with both detectives and detective fiction. Even before Agatha Christie鈥檚 Miss Marple first appeared in 1930, they did their share of crime-solving, and Christie is just one of the many women writers prominent in the field in the 鈥楪olden Age鈥� of detective fiction in the 1920s and 1930s. Women including Vera Caspary and Dorothy B. Hughes wrote noir fiction in the mid-century, often pushing back against the tropes and conventions of their hard-boiled male contemporaries; and P. D. James, Sue Grafton, and Sara Paretsky are only a few of the many women whose crime fiction topped late 20th-century best-seller lists. Many contemporary writers use the form to explore links between individual crises and systemic injustices. In this course we will read a sampling of fiction by women that explores the relationship between gender and crime, sometimes by centering women as investigators, sometimes by interrogating women鈥檚 conventional roles in the mystery genre, from victim to femme fatale. We will explore the different approaches our readings take to questions about crime, law, justice, morality, knowledge, and power, and about the role class and race play in how these issues are configured and what resolution is imagined as possible or desirable.

ENGL 4417: Literatures of the Expanded Field in Canada
This seminar explores Canadian literature from 1945 to the present, focusing on English-language texts and texts in translation. Students will examine innovative literary works across genres, including poetry, prose, drama, comics, and more, examining how unconventional approaches to literary production challenge dominant narratives and broaden the scope of literatures in Canada. 

ENGL 4813: Literature and Science
This course will examine the growing tension between the humanities and the sciences in the 19th century, and it will particularly focus on how this tension was reflected in literary texts, which often addressed the implications and applications of new scientific theories in such fields as biology, geology, psychology, and medicine. While some writers sought to critique scientific concepts or question the ethics of scientific practices, others offered valuable contributions to scientific debates or attempted to further scientific knowledge through imaginative speculation and extrapolation. By comparing these literary texts to scientific texts from the same period, students will learn how writers and scientists addressed many of the same issues, such as the nature of perception, cognition, and evolution. By the end of the course students will have a better understanding of the ways in which knowledge has historically been transferred between literature and science, and they will have a greater appreciation of the benefits and limitations of this interdisciplinary exchange of ideas.