2025-2026 Academic Year

Fall 2025

ENGL 101 World Lit: Race, Nat & Coloniz
What does it mean to imagine yourself as a member of a nation? What happens when nations are colonized, fractured, and reconstituted? How are conceptions of race and racial identity informed by nation states and national identity? This course considers how contemporary works of literature from around the world respond to these questions. We will focus on 20th and 21st century poetry, memoir, and short stories by writers including, among others, No’u Revilla, Haunani-Kay Trask, Tash Aw, Chris Abani, Mosab Abu Toha, and Vivien Sansour. Through close and contextualized readings, we will analyze how these authors imagine individuals, families, and communities within and across national borders, paying particular attention to questions of race, gender, class, and sexuality.What does it mean to imagine yourself as a member of a nation? What happens when nations are fractured and reconstituted? Where do you belong if you move between nations or are forcibly displaced? This course considers how contemporary works of literature from Polynesia, Asia Pacific, South Asia, and the Middle East respond to these questions. We will focus on 20th and 21st century literature by authors including Haunani-Kay Trask, Albert Wendt, Tash Aw, Rohinton Mistry, Leila Ahmed, and Rasha Abbas. Through close and contextualized readings, we will analyze how these authors imagine individuals and families within and across nations, and how their worlds are shaped by intersecting identities. In so doing, we will focus on the specific political and literary histories from which each text emerges, particularly experiences of Western colonization in each of the designated regions. By bringing these texts and contexts together, we will engage histories of both colonization and resistance, while also examining how new conceptions of nation and identity emerge from this selection of World Literature.

ENGL 221 Multicult: Race/Rhet/Write
Multiculturalism is often celebrated as the ideal approach to managing racial, cultural, and religious differences within society. However, this concept has also been critiqued for the ways in which it masks systemic inequalities and deep-seated prejudices. Focusing on questions of race, power, and privilege, this course will examine narratives of multiculturalism in North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia. Students will read and respond to a diverse range of sources including: poetry, fiction, scholarly essays, advertising campaigns, political speeches, and national laws. Our primary literary texts will include Tash Aw's The Face: Strangers on a Pier (2016), Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me (2015), and Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire (2017). This course aims to help students strengthen their analytical writing, critical thinking, and close reading skills, thereby enabling them to understand and critique how multiculturalism has shaped the lived experiences of communities around the world.

ENGL 321 Border Cross: Asian, Am Lit
This course explores the various borders and border crossings that emerge across 20th and 21st century Asian American literature by writers including Celeste Ng, Carlos Bulosan, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, lê thi diem thúy, and John Okada. Our examination of these texts will be framed by the following questions: What kinds of borders are imagined in these texts? How do these borders intersect with the realities of actual geopolitical borders and immigration acts? How do race, gender, citizenship, and class influence the ways in which characters and communities negotiate these borders? We will unpack how literary texts articulate diverse immigrant experiences and engage the tensions of both real and imagined border crossings. In the process, this course will also explore the very definition of "Asian American," considering the communities that are included and excluded from this collective, as well as their specific socio-political histories.