Fall 2026 English Courses

ENG 129

Books You Need to Read: The “Great” American Novel

Instructor: Andrew Hebard CRN: 14025
MW 10:05 - 11:25am
BAC 1022

This course has two goals.  The first is to expose you to some great works of American literature, to explore questions about how and why we value some literary works as “great,” and to connect these works to themes that continue to be relevant in our current historical moment.  

The second is to have you reflect on your reading practices.  At many points in your future studies and careers, you will be asked to read texts that require sustained attention and this course is designed to help you develop strategies for becoming good at that kind of reading in a world where attention is increasingly becoming a scarce resource. 

This course also has an optional co-enrollment in HUM 320 Humanities Lab: Attention and Distraction, a 2-credit hour sprint course that counts for Experiential Learning. Please contact Andrew Hebard (hebarda@miamioh.edu) for more information on the HUM course.

ENG 335

18th Century English Literature: Where Did Jane Austen Come From

Instructor: James Bromley
CRN: 15345
TR 11:40am - 1pm
BAC 1022

In this course, we will immerse ourselves in the rich literary and cultural landscape of the era that gave rise to the beloved novelist, Jane Austen. How and why did types of writing that are still popular, such as adventure fiction, satire, the gothic, and the novel itself, emerge and evolve in this time period? What did it mean to write in an age when reading was thought by some to incite wickedness and by others to be a path to personal happiness and social improvement? How do ideas from the cult of sensibility continue to influence how we understand ourselves and how we relate to others? If you’re a fan of Bridgerton, come explore the time period that inspired the series by reading work by Daniel DeFoe, Jonathan Swift, Eliza Haywood, Frances Burney, and, of course, Jane Austen.

ENG 387

Studies in Poetry

Instructor: Cathy Wagner
CRN: 15349
MW 1:15 - 3:45pm
BAC 1025

In 387, we’ll read (and write) new poetry slowly and closely together, treating it as a field for noticing, pleasuring in and playing with the ways we live together now. Can poetry's challenges help us feel freshly into intimidating subjects like sex and money? into the ways we frame interactions with our parents and our lovers, with countries we go to war with? Can we get a fresh read on our relations with plants, animals, and our built environment? We’ll read Lesyk Panasiuk and Ahmad Almallah on life during wartime, Rupi Kaur on love and abuse, Tommy Pico and Jjjjerome Ellis on living with other-than-humans, and Ross Gay on basketball.

ENG 415

Professional Writing Capstone

Instructor: Emily Legg
CRN: 12409
TR 11:40am - 1pm
BAC 3002

What does it mean to be a writer who researches? Or a researcher who writes? In ENG 415, you'll stop treating those as separate things. This capstone puts research methods at the center of professional writing practice. You'll investigate how different methods shape what we can know, ask, and say, and then use that knowledge to create real communications for a real community partner.

Working as a project team, you'll meet with community members, assess their needs, and design, write, and edit materials they'll actually use. You'll also have a meaningful role in shaping the project: from the moment the work begins, the class collectively decides what gets done, when, and by whom.

By the end of the semester, you'll have hands-on experience in research methodology, content strategy and creation, rhetorical analysis, user-experience research, and collaborative project management. These are skills that travel with you no matter where your career in professional writing takes you.

ENG 420

Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction

Instructor: Joseph BatesCRN: 10107
TR 1:15 - 2:35pm
IRV 024

In this advanced fiction workshop, the majority of the reading we’ll do will be your own prose as well as that of your peers. We’ll start off the semester by asking the seemingly-simple question
of what makes a story—what a story feels like, how it moves a reader, how it makes bigger
meaning even in a short space—and we’ll apply what we learn to our storytelling practice across
forms, including flash and micro fiction, borrowed forms, short stories, and longer works. We’ll
also look at the state of literary publishing, leading to an assignment where you’ll send out one of your stories (or a self-contained novel excerpt, or flash fiction) to a selection of literary journals.

LIN 460

Capstone in Linguistics

Instructor: So Young Lee
CRN: 13415
MW 1:15 - 2:35pm
BAC 0025

This senior capstone is designed for Linguistics majors as a culminating course at Miami. You will work on projects to discover how linguists observe, collect, and analyze language data. You will learn to apply linguistic methodologies to problems about how language shapes our perceptions, how language mediates between people and institutions, or how to develop formal systems that enable computers to parse human sentences. As Linguistics sits at the intersection of the Humanities and Social Sciences, this course is inherently interdisciplinary and has an emphasis on critical thinking and linguistic analysis. You will be asked to apply knowledge gained throughout your time at Miami from other Linguistics courses and experiences to address real-world problems through a final group project, which will be shared with the entire class. Prerequisites: LIN 201