English Courses

1 credit ENGL 100
3 credits ENGL 130

ENGL 100HON, Section 1
MWF 9:05 – 9:55 a.m.
(must take concurrently with  ENGL 130HON, Section 48)

ENGL 100, Section 2
MWF 12:20 – 1:10 p.m.
(must take concurrently with  ENGL 130, Section 19)

ENGL 100, Section 3
MWF 1:25 – 2:15 p.m
(must take concurrently with  ENGL 130, Section 22)

ENGL 100, Section 4
MWF 2:30 – 3:45 p.m
(must take concurrently with  ENGL 130, Section 24)

ENGL 100 Humanities Seminar in Self, Citizenship, and Community (1 cr)  is a required co-requisite to Cornerstone ENGL 130. This 4-week intensive Humanities seminar explores the question of what individuals owe their communities. We will explore this question through careful reading and discussion of essays and short stories. Writing assignments will encourage personal reflection by asking students to consider how the readings complicate typical understandings of self and society as they consider their own developing sense of self.
(January 11 – February 10)

ENGL 130 Composition II Writing for Public Audiences (3 cr) and its required co-requisite of ENGL 100 asks students to participate in writing, research, and collaboration necessary to solve a community problem. Students will use their experience with the public project to reflect on issues raised by the ENGL 100 seminar. These opportunities for reflection on self and society are connected to the development of leadership skills.
(February 12 – May 14)

Essential Studies

Communication (2)

3 credits

This course is designed to introduce students to—and to help them practice—the ways that people in a university setting write, read, and think. Through readings and writing assignments, students learn to analyze, synthesize, interpret, and evaluate ideas, information, situations, and texts. By the end of the course, students should:

• Use composing and reading for inquiry, learning, critical thinking, and communicating in various contexts;
• Read a diverse range of texts, attending especially to relationships between assertion and evidence, to patterns of organization, and to how these features function for different audiences and situations;
• Use strategies—such as interpretation, synthesis, response, and critique—to compose texts that integrate your ideas with those from our readings;
• Develop a writing project through multiple drafts;
• Develop flexible strategies for reading, drafting, reviewing, collaborating, revising, rewriting, rereading, and editing;
• Learn to give and to act on productive feedback to works in progress;
• Reflect on the development of your composing practices and how those practices influence your writing and reading;
• Develop knowledge of linguistic structures, including grammar, punctuation, and spelling, through practice in composing and revising;
• Practice applying citation conventions systematically in your own work.

To promote these outcomes, the course will also engage students in a real, current, and on-going academic project. In the process, students engage in serious and sustained work, reading academic and popular essays, writing four or five formal papers, and working through many stages of drafting and revising.

Essential Studies

Communication (1)

3 credits

This course, which builds upon ENGL 110, gives students experience with genres and rhetorical situations beyond the academic classroom. In begins with a set of common readings on an important social issue to establish a context for the work of the class. Throughout the semester, students engage in a series of research tasks and writing projects that center on a collaboratively-authored project proposal or recommendation for a specific audience or community. Then, students use the knowledge gained through research and rhetorical awareness to produce documents that will help inform and persuade the public. By the end of the course, students should:

• Learn and use key rhetorical concepts through analyzing and composing a variety of texts;
• Gain experience reading and composing in several genres to understand how genre conventions shape and are shaped by readers’ and writers’ practices and purposes;
• Develop facility in responding to a variety of situations and contexts calling for purposeful shifts in voice, tone, level of formality, design, medium, and/or structure;
• Locate and evaluate (for credibility, sufficiency, accuracy, timeliness, bias and so on) primary and secondary research materials;
• Experience the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes;
• Learn to give and to act on productive feedback to works in progress;
• Adapt composing processes for a variety of technologies and modalities to address a range of audiences;
• Gain experience negotiating variations in genre conventions;
• Learn common formats and/or design features for different kinds of texts;
• Practice applying citation conventions systematically in your own work.

Through all of its projects, the course builds students' ability to work rhetorically--to think carefully about the audience, purpose, persona, and genre, as well as the impact that writing can have in the community. Like ENGL 110, this course requires revision, peer review, group projects, and writing workshops.

To promote these outcomes, the course will also engage students in a real, current, and on-going academic project. In the process, students engage in serious and sustained work, reading academic and popular essays, writing four or five formal papers, and working through many stages of drafting and revising.

Essential Studies

Communication (2)

O. Kost
Section 1: MWF 12:20 – 1:10 p.m.
C. Walker-Basu
Section 2: MWF 1:25 – 2:15 p.m.
3 credits

Writing is a muscle and good writers exercise regularly. ENGL 226 is an introductory course open to students of any major who are interested in exercising their writing muscles by reading, writing, and talking about reading and writing. The class will be discussion-based and focused on reading and writing assignments done both inside and outside of the classroom. Students will additionally be required to compose numerous, original creative works of their own, including short fiction and poetry. These works will be shared and critiqued in group workshops so that they may be revised as part of the student’s creative portfolio.

Essential Studies

Fine Arts

M. Walid
T/TH 9:30 – 10:45 a.m.
3 credits

A course that introduces students to issues of environmentalism, sustainability, and ecocriticism through discussion of literary texts and film.

Essential Studies

Humanities; also cross-listed core curriculum in Environmental Studies.

Dr. Koleva
Section 1: MWF 9:05 – 9:55 a.m.
3 credits

Individualism and Self-Expression

In American culture, there is a deep-seated belief that fulfillment and well-being are products of individual effort and self-expression. In this ideological frame, strong individuality is instrumental to achieve the desired result. But what does it mean to have a strong individuality? Does the process of acquiring and expressing it require people to be individualists? Is the individualist a rebel, a freedom-fighter, a self-reliant winner, a leader in the making, a lawbreaker, a romantic loner, a self-centered opportunist or something else? How is the commitment to individuality and individualism shaping one’s sense of worth and relationship to social collectives such as families, communities, or society at large?

In this course, we will study how people of different social and cultural backgrounds perform under the cultural pressure of individualism and how they fare in terms of social realization and acceptance. We will think about how systems of privilege and oppression define specific acts of self-expression and open the door to categorization of people’s existence and worth.

We will use a mix of sources – literature, film, media publications, and others – to identify the current cultural assumptions about individuality and individualism, then, we will turn to specific experiences of being and becoming an individualist at different historical times, and we will think further about the influence of individualism and its cultural variants on us. 

Essential Studies

Humanities
Analyzing Worldviews

R. Conley
Section 2: MWF 10:10 – 11:00 a.m.
3 credits

Boyhood

English 230 uses "story" (literature, film, visual media, and other texts) to analyze society. This semester we will be analyzing culture, community and the world through the lens of Boyhood. We will read books, stories, poems and comics, we will watch TV shows and movies, we will listen to songs, we will look at art and advertisements. 

In our class, "story" is a tool through which we can explore how cultural ideologies shape our ways of living in and understanding the world while also organizing systems of power. We will unpack the cultural ideology of Boyhood to look at how our ideas about what “it” is have changed over time and how Boyhood is shaped by the expectations people have for boys, men and even girls and women. We will come to understand Boyhood as a "cultural ideology": a deeply held, unquestioned popular belief or assumption that we ascribe to – whether we are aware of that fact or not. 

This course will allow for sustained examination of this cultural ideology (and related beliefs), and closer examination of the belief that may reveal Boyhood has larger cultural, social, and political consequences for the lives of those it touches. 

All students must have the following books:
A Separate Peace – John Knowles
Blankets – Craig Thompson

Essential Studies

Humanities
Analyzing Worldviews

Dr. Wigard
T/TH 12:30 – 1:45 p.m.
3 credits

This course will introduce students to various schools of thought and methodologies within the field of digital humanities (DH), which brings the application of computing to humanities questions, and in turn, uses the humanities to interrogate technology. We will do so through a combination of reading (and interrogating) one course textbook on DH; exploring several DH projects each week; and engaging in building our own individual and group DH projects themed around text analysis, mapping, and Large Language Models (LLMs).

A Note: I do not expect you to have any prior computing experience, nor proficiency in coding. I will expect you to develop these skills both within and outside of class, independently of my lectures.

Essential Studies

Humanities
Digital Information Literacy

Dr. Alberts
MWF 12:20 – 1:10 p.m.
3 credits

This class is designed to take your reading and writing to the next level. While it is the first part of our introduction to the English major and required for the Creative Writing Certificate, the skills taught—critical thinking, deep reading, effective argumentation, and clear communication—are useful regardless of major or career goals.
 
This class will help prepare you for upper-level courses by training you in the close reading of texts—fiction, poetry, plays, music videos, and films. In other words, it teaches you to move beyond the important, but often vague and emotional reactions we all have to written texts ("I hate that character!" or "This must be true!" or "This must be a lie!") and to analyze instead the language choices writers make in order to elicit those reactions (sometimes called the craft of the text) and create meaning. This course will ask you to read literary texts across a variety of genres in more detail than you are likely to have done in the past. It will require you to consider not only the content of those texts (that is, what they say), but also their form (that is, how they say what they say), and how the two work together.
 
If the “reading texts” portion of the course is breaking down texts into their various parts, the “writing about texts” portion is about putting those parts back together again in a new way. The course will ask you to practice the sort of expository writing that you’ll eventually do in upper-level courses: it will focus on framing appropriate arguments about literary texts, rather than emotional responses to them; on constructing strong statements that clearly communicate debatable claims; on selecting, interpreting, and organizing textual evidence to support those claims and to persuade your reader.
 
We’ll work through a series of both short and formal writing assignments: "prewritings" will be a way of collecting and assessing literary data; short responses use that data to get ideas started; then we’ll draft, conference, and revise short essays assignments. You'll note the use of "we:" this will be a small class with frequent feedback, the intent of which is to help you refine your own use of language as you discuss that of other writers. 

Essential Studies

Humanities
Advanced Communication

Dr. Robison
MWF 11:15 a.m. – 12:05 p.m.
3 credits

We spend much of our life "interpreting": we try to understand, for example, the actions, behaviors, and words of our friends and family; the political assumptions behind the news we read and see; the values implicit in our laws or in the ethical choices we make; the larger meanings behind the films, books, and television shows we consume.  As important as interpretation is for living a rich and full intellectual life, we should also acknowledge that no interpretation can be fully objective or fully correct: our interpretations are themselves shaped by our own worldviews, by the social and cultural contexts we inhabit.  

This course looks closely at the act of interpretation, asking students to become conscious of how they approach literary interpretation and offering students a variety of interpretive strategies with which they can consciously experiment.  We will talk, in this class, about literary interpretation as the act of putting on a new pair of glasses that helps you to see texts in a new way.  As you "try on" these different lenses (psychoanalytic criticism, gender criticism, historical criticism, for example), the course will also help you to understand more about the real-world social, political, and philosophical issues that gave rise to these methods of interpretation.

English 272 is required of English majors and minors but is open to anyone who would like to think more about the act of interpretation—and anyone who would like to consider their own interpretive strategies.  Students, for example, involved in range of creative projects; interested in artistic, educational, or analytical fields; as well as students considering Law School, will find the issues raised by this class to be productive.  

The class will be conducted through active discussion, so students should be prepared to stay caught up with reading assignments and to come to class ready to participate and try out new ideas!

Dr. Kitzes
T/TH 9:30 – 10:45 a.m.
3 credits

In her foreword to The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman describes the nineteenth century as “the most accelerated rate of change” in human history. The early years were a period of human and animal power, “supplemented by that of wind and water. The Twentieth… capacities in transportation, communication, production, manufacture and weaponry multiplied a thousandfold by the energy of machines.” This period of extended disruptions and upheaval is reflected in the literature, with extraordinary new developments in subject matter, in techniques, even in audiences and their expectations. We’ll cover as many of these as time allows. We’ll bring in the many revolutions – scientific and technological, as well as political. We’ll look at some exciting literary movements, including the Romantics, the pre-Raphaelites, the Modernists. And (to borrow a familiar term from the Greek tragedies) we’ll examine the catastrophes that followed, including the century when warfare turned to the art of extermination. In this context, where does literature fit in? We all remember a famous philosopher, who declared that all art after Auschwitz is barbarism; but I prefer the words of the poet, who states in his Fadensonnen, “There are still songs to sing after mankind.”

Essential Studies

Humanities

Dr. Kielmeyer
T/TH 11 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.

How do we write what’s true? This course will serve as an introduction to the analysis and craft of creative nonfiction writing. We will explore a range of genres and mediums including memoirs, graphic memoirs, reviews, podcasts, documentaries, journalism, and the “essay.” We’ll learn what an essay even is. We'll ask questions about creativity, facts, and memory. We’ll work to understand how authors use rhetorical and creative strategies to write compelling nonfiction, then use what we learn about effective reading strategies to work through the process of crafting your own essays.

Through close readings and workshops, we will spend the semester trying to understand and recreate the tension between traditional creative writing strategies (plot, narrative, character development, conflict) and the accuracy that creative nonfiction writers must balance in order to maintain the distinction of nonfiction. We’ll talk about ethics, morals, truths, and lies. You will practice developing an eye for writing techniques and methods, while also testing out your own voices as memoirists and essayists. As readers and writers, you’ll do research on topics of your choice to help build confidence and authority in your ideas and perspectives. Ultimately, you’ll learn how to write what you know, using the techniques provided by creative nonfiction writers of today. 

Essential Studies

Fine Arts
Advanced Communication

Dr. Sauer
T/TH 2 – 3:15 p.m.
3 credits

Modern Grammar provides grammatical analysis—descriptions of the language as it exists and as it is used; that is, what the English language “can and will do.” We will look at the linguistic structure of English from two points of view. Topics we will cover include traditional grammatical description and terms, linguistic evidence for the constituent structure of English sentences, arguments for transformations, some basics of modern work on syntax, and controversies over usage. The primary goal is rather to foster the realization that English grammar is a system, and (generally) a simple one at that, whose purpose is to encode meanings that are used frequently in language. This course does not review basic mechanical and usage skills. However, we may discuss them as they come up.

This course is cross-listed with CSD 340: Normal Language Structure.

Dr. LaFaive
M/W 1:25 – 2:40 p.m.
3 credits

Memoir: History, Craft, & Ethics

From St. Augustine’s Confessions to Blake Butler’s Molly, memoir has chronicled the human condition and incited fierce debates about authorship, believability, confession, memory, and truth. This course is a study of those ethical debates alongside the history and craft considerations of the memoir genre.

Dr. Caraher
T/TH 3:30 – 4:45 p.m.
3 credits

The best way to learn to be an editor or publisher is by ... editing and publishing. This class will introduce you to some basic skills associated with editing and publishing as well as the publishing industry more broadly. More than that, we'll work together to put those skills into practice with both UND's century‐old literary magazine North Dakota Quarterly and an ongoing project to celebrate Grand Forks's 150th birthday. 

Over the course of the semester, you will learn about all stages of producing a bi‐annual literary magazine and a book and contribute to the publication of an issue of NDQ and a creative new book celebrating the history of our city. 

Dr. Carson
Wednesdays 3:30 – 6:00 p.m.
Online Synchronous
3 credits

Bibles as Literature and in the Arts

Also offered as ENGL 369 HON

This class will allow us to pursue two interwoven projects of study: 

1. We’ll read and analyze “as literature” several key texts from the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and the New Testament.  Our work in this context will be to analyze these biblical texts using the same critical approaches we would use with other literary works, with special attention paid to narrative, plot, characters, symbolism, metaphor, irony, humor, tragedy, point of view, setting and “performance spaces,” etc.  We will also look at the historical contexts of these writings as they first appeared in antiquity, and as they have been interpreted over many centuries.  We’ll look at specific literary genres such as creation narratives, gospels, and “letters as literature,” and we’ll cover special topics such as “apocalyptic imagination” and literary eco-criticism.
2. We’ll analyze the various ways in which selected writers, visual and new media artists, filmmakers, musicians and others have worked with the biblical story world within their own art.  Our shared focus will be some 20th and 21st century creative works, but students will have an opportunity to explore other eras of interest to them. Here we’ll look closely at the ways that biblical stories and characters are interpreted within various artistic works, paying special attention to writers and visual/film artists who seem interested in creating works of art as social commentary. 

This is not a broad survey class of biblical literature: rather we will be working most closely with: Genesis, Exodus, Mark, Matthew, Philemon, James, and Revelation, and we’ll talk about selected non-canonical texts such as the Gospel of Thomas.

Required Texts: (in addition to the many open-access digital sources provided in the course):

1. Genesis: Translation and Commentary. Robert Alter.  W.W. Norton Company, 1997. Paperback. ISBN:  978-0393316704
2. The New Testament. Richmond Lattimore.  North Point Press. 1997. Paperback. ISBN: 978-0865475243

This course is open to all majors and does not require previous experience with the topic, but will require energetic reading and an interest in thinking critically across time and place. Students will have frequent opportunities to pursue their own interests via several short assignments and a longer independent project. 

Essential Studies

Humanities

Dr. Henry
T/TH 11 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.
3 credits

Who Tells the Story

Towards the end of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, painter Lily Briscoe realizes that a single person’s memory isn’t the whole story. Reflecting on the outsized influence of Mrs. Ramsay's life and generosity, Lily realizes that her perspective is only one sliver of the story: “One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with [. . .]. Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with.”

This same idea applies to how we experience events and historical moments: we need fifty pairs of eyes (or more) to perceive the world around us and to open ourselves to versions of it that may escape our own frame of reference. To put this a little differently, the story is only one part of the experience created in fiction. Who Tells the Story—the theme of this workshop and the 2027 UND Writers Conference—also shapes the vision and experience of a work of fiction.

The Spring 2027 advanced fiction workshop will incorporate work from the featured authors at the 2027 UND Writers Conference. (Assigned fiction may also include additional authors from the Writers Conference archives.) We’ll learn how we can borrow and adapt techniques from literary fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction to expand our own set of narrative strategies. These discussions will be further supported by work on narrative voice, perspective, and the acts of witnessing or perceiving. Potential secondary sources may include Christopher Castellani’s The Art of Perspective, Haruki Murakami’s Novelist as Vocation, and Sarah Minor’s Carousel: An Essay on Seeing, amongst others. (Final reading list TBD.)

Prerequisite: ENGL 306 or permission of instructor. Repeatable to 6 credits. 

This course is approved for Graduate Credit.

Dr. Kitzes
T/TH 12:30 – 1:45 p.m.
3 credits

Inventing Early Modern Literature

Course description forthcoming.

Essential Studies

Capstone

This course is approved for graduate credit.

Dr. Wigard
T/TH 2 – 3:15 p.m.
3 credits

Critical Game Studies

This course will introduce students to various schools of thought and critical lenses within the field of game studies: historical studies (technological advancements, shifts in definition); cultural studies (race, gender, sexuality); formal studies (play, narrative, structure); means of production (indie developers and the games industry); critical-making and game design; rhetoric studies; and more. We will accomplish this, together, by studying and playing through one common video game: Stardew Valley, a lightweight, inexpensive, popular, and rich video game that can be played on almost any mobile device, gaming console, or computer. Each week, we will learn one new critical lens, apply this to Stardew Valley in conjunction with previous weeks’ lenses, and discuss our findings within class. Alongside of this, we’ll consider other kinds of interactive texts, including films, board games, RPGs, comics, zines, and “Playful literature,” with periodic visits to UND’s newly established Video Games Lab in the Chester Fritz Library to play and study other video games. Ultimately, in this course, we will learn, and we will play, and we see that those two things are deeply intertwined. 

Essential Studies

Capstone

This course is approved for graduate credit.

Dr. Donehower
M/W 3 – 4:15 p.m.
3 credits

This course is an introduction to theories and methods of teaching college English. It is required of Graduate Teaching Assistants in English. Its goal is to familiarize you with a variety of theories and pedagogical models that influence the teaching of literature, creative writing, and composition at the college level, with an emphasis on composition. By the end of the course, students should be able to articulate different approaches to the teaching of college English and support their particular stances on these approaches. Students will also gain some background in classroom-based research. Work in the course consists of weekly response papers to readings and a course project that is designed to introduce students to classroom-based research, to literature in the field of writing studies, and to writing as a reflective pedagogical practitioner. It is modeled on the “Instructional Note” genre featured in the journal Teaching English in the Two-Year College (TETYC). To successfully enact this genre, students must establish an exigency (identify a teaching problem to be addressed); situate the strategy in the context of existing research (compose a brief literature review); describe how to implement the instructional strategy that was designed by the writer and tried in the classroom; and offer clear outcomes by providing evidence of change in English 110 students’ processes, products, knowledge, and/or beliefs. Early in the semester, students determine an area in which they wish to experiment in their teaching in the spring semester. These experiments lead to the instructional note.

Dr. LaFaive
Wednesdays 4:30 – 7 p.m.
3 credits

Feminist Theory

This course is an overview of feminist theory. Particular attention will be paid to foundational texts necessary for literary study and analysis as well as contemporary discussions around autotheory, ecofeminism, and intersectionality, among others.

Dr. O'Leary
Tuesdays 3:30 – 6 p.m.
3 credits

Postcolonial Metabolisms

Writing in Reminisces of My Irish Journey (1849), Thomas Carlyle’s description of the “human scarecrows” constituting the “hungriest of human populations” in an Ireland devastated by famine, observed through a carriage window, shows the effect of (at the time of his writing) a nearly three-hundred-year-old policy. This policy was a policy of hunger; managed satiety and induced starvation remained a cornerstone of European colonial policy, a feature of “development” in modernity, and indexes how, whether, and to what extent people can actively participate in their own lives and communities. In this course, we will scrutinize how imperialism remains hungry; as Ann Laura Stoler argues, imperialism and colonialism have not ended—they have “mutated,” persisting as a conjoined global project with significant implications in conceptual, aesthetic, and infrastructural registers. In this course, we will explore texts that engage with the interminable duration of colonialism, using hunger (and the metabolic more broadly) as a guiding analytic to do so. Our assemblage of texts includes novels, poems, travel literature, and films from Ireland, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and other countries "formerly" occupied by Western European powers. Additionally, we will develop a (post)colonial theoretical and critical vocabulary, reading from literary theorists such as Edward Said, Anne McClintock, and Lauren Berlant; and political theorists including Achille Mbembe, Jean-François Bayart, and Frantz Fanon.

Dr. Wolfe
M/W 3 – 4:30 p.m.
3 credits

Required for masters’ degree students pursuing the portfolio option, this course explores rhetorical strategies of academic writing in the discipline of English, and supports students through the development of the portfolio project.