Teaching

ENGL 302: Early English Lyric and Its Others

Fall 2025, Thursday 3.30-6

This course surveys lyric poetry written in English from approximately 1300-1600. We will consider the critical significance of lyric within the larger canon of early English literature by thinking about its near generic others – prayer, petition, and song – and by engaging with recent developments in lyric theory. How or where is lyric construed as a distinctive mode of expression in early Britain? What is the place of this corpus within the broader English lyric “tradition”? What discontinuities mark off “medieval lyric” from “early modern” or “Renaissance”? Through this inquiry, we will grapple with the interrelated problems of historicist methodology, monolingual canon formation, and disciplinary organization.

Many of the poems we read are anonymous, but named authors include Geoffrey Chaucer, William Herebert, John Lydgate, John Audelay, William Dunbar, John Skelton, Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare.

ENGL 229: History of the English Language

Spring 2025, Mondays and Wednesdays 2.30-3.45

This course is an introduction to the history of the English language, from Old English (Anglo-Saxon) to Present-Day English (PDE). We’ll focus on the development of specific grammatical and phonetic features, but we’ll also think about larger historical narratives that intersect with HEL, and our primary texts will be examples from the English literary tradition. Throughout the semester we will confront the major ideological and theoretical issues raised by a course that treats “English” as stable or unitary over a span of more than 1,500 years. What is English? Are some versions better, or more “correct,” than others? And how does the global character of English change or adapt between its earliest, pre-Conquest forms and its post-colonial iterations?