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From Words to Worlds—Discover English Courses at OSU!

This Fall, discover courses that spark curiosity and creativity—ranging from fiction, film, and creative writing to linguistics, digital culture, and media studies. Whether you want to dive into literature, explore new voices, or sharpen your writing, our Fall 2026 lineup has something for you!

ENGL 3183: Native American Literature

ENGL 3183: Native American Literature — This course approaches global Indigenous literatures by engaging with ongoing and resurgent forms of relating to the land. As we will explore, Native writers across the globe have cultivated knowledge-ways about plants, animals, and geological formations that preceded the emergences of settler colonialism and capitalism and have continued to influence contemporary environmental movements. In this way, our conversations investigate different entry-points towards answering several questions. Throughout the semester, we will take up a series of questions: What changes if we consider “human beings,” “animals,” and “nature” not as wholly distinct modes of existence, but as necessarily intertwined and coextensive lives? And how might taking seriously what land, plants, and non-human beings know offer us pathways— speculative and vibrant—to decolonial futures? By asking these questions, we will come to see how land functions “as pedagogy,” in Mississauga Nishnabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s words—where Indigenous stories about the land we dwell upon teaches us “how to live life.”

ENGL 3410: Weird Tales for a Weird World

ENGL 3410: Weird Tales for a Weird World — The world in which we live keeps getting stranger, harder to understand, more and more alien to us, so no one should be surprised to find that both writers and readers have begun to abandon so-called “realistic” storytelling in favor of an approach more in tune with the world’s weirdness. For over a century, that approach has been called “weird fiction,” and it refers to an unstable hybrid of science fiction, fantasy, and horror that first appeared in cheap, disposable pulp magazines such as Weird Tales just before and after the First World War. Its leading exponent was the American writer H.P. Lovecraft, but today weird fiction and its offshoots in cinema, graphic novels, and anime are being created around the world, often by highly respected, award-winning, even best-selling authors and artists. This course will provide students with a survey of the global weird old and new, in print, graphic fiction, and cinema, featuring creators from the US and UK, Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa. A parallel series of film screenings will trace the development of weird cinema from the 1960s to the 21st century. Readings will include Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, Kathe Koja, Leena Krohn, Stanislaw Lem, Jeff VanderMeer, China Miéville, M. John Harrison, Junji Ito, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Amos Tutuola, Ben Okri, Reza Negarestani, and Usman Malik. Films will include The Call of Cthulhu, Quatermass and the Pit, Alien, The Thing, Hellboy, Cabin in the Woods, Tumbbad, and Mad God.

ENGL 3343: Reading Poetry

ENGL 3343: Reading Poetry — What is poetry? This course will begin by looking at some ways people have answered that question, from Ancient Greece to the present day, and how definitions have changed in response to poets finding new ways to break the rules. We’ll learn to recognize and analyze some established poetic forms and track their formal evolutions, practice scanning metered verse, and explore the techniques and practices of free verse. The semester will end with an extended consideration of poetry’s political power, by way of the works of June Jordan.

ENGL 3440: The Superhero Film

ENGL 3440: The Superhero Film — This ENGL 3440 course will take a closer look at the superhero genre, beginning with its comic-book origins, through decades of television serials, and franchise extended universes. A goal in this course is to approach the superhero genre critically - how do these works fit in to ideological, historical, technological, and sociopolitical contexts? Through an analysis of academic texts, trade press, film, and other media, we will examine the role of the superhero genre in popular culture.

ENGL 3040: I, Too, Sing America

ENGL 3040: I, Too, Sing America — What does it mean to "sing, America" as Langston Hughes writes in his poem "I, Too"? Using your own multitudinous "I," you will learn and practice craft techniques to help you transform personal experiences, histories, interests, and ideas into original poetry. You will receive feedback on your poems from your peers and professor. We will read several poetry collections, including She Had Some Horses by Joy Harjo, The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich, and American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes. You will also contribute to the class reading list by choosing published poems for the class to read throughout the semester, and leading discussions on these poems. We will have field trips to the OSU ArtMuseum, OSU Special Collections, and Stillwater History museum; and we will use these spaces and the materials in them as inspiration for writing. There's a chair at the table for you in this class.

ENGL 3030: Writing Monsters

ENGL 3030: Writing Monsters — This workshop will focus on the creative process of writing original short stories. Because this class focuses on writing and the creative process, we will examine our own work and the work of published fiction writers. The type, form, and audience of short stories covered in this class will vary. Previously offered as ENGL 3033. Offered for fixed credit, 3 credit hours, maximum of 9 credit hours.

ENGL 3243: Literary Theory and Criticism

ENGL 3243: Literary Theory and Criticism — The primary aim of this course is to create better understanding and appreciation of differences as well as points of correspondence between foundational ideas for the diverse areas of study and modes of work housed within the English Department. The majority of readings date from the last century, but some will derive from the mid-19th century and ancient history as well. Instead of dropping names of people, -isms, or titles to signify what “major works of critical theory and literary criticism” we’ll evaluate and discuss throughout the semester, here are some questions that will orient and shape a communal approach to reading, writing, and learning in this class: What is language, and what does it do? How does creative expression register differently in writing and other forms of representation / media? What’s the difference between dream and fantasy, truth and fiction? What is deconstruction, anyway? How can we give voice to the voiceless? What power dynamics shape what’s possible in language? At the start of the semester, students will have the opportunity to offer input on the schedule of readings we adopt to explore these questions. Course requirements will include attendance and participation, periodic short response papers, approximately 75-pages of reading per week, and a final that may take the form of either a 12-15 page scholarly essay or a creative, community-engaged project.

ENGL 4093: Language in America

ENGL 4093: Language in America

ENGL 4700: Global Jane Austen

ENGL 4700: Global Jane Austen — Have you ever wondered why Jane Austen became so famous and why we continue to read her work? Come join us this fall as we explore Austen's major novels, as well as adaptations through different questions: Would Austen have been familiar with feminist writing of her day? How did she perceive questions of gender, power, and social class? And why do her novels continue to resonate in our day, especially in global films and other adaptations?

ENGL 4310-5480: The Southern Gothic

ENGL 4310-5480: The Southern Gothic — In this course we will consider various iterations of the Southern Gothic aesthetic across diverse twentieth and twenty-first century multimedia texts. We will read novels, short stories, and drama from the likes of William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, and Octavia Butler. Additionally, we will watch versions of the Southern Gothic on screen, such as HBO's True Detective (2014), and Ryan Coogler's Sinners (2025). We will round out our study by addressing the impact of the Southern Gothic on other media such as the photography of Walker Evans, and the music of Ethel Cain and Tyler Childers. Offered with ENGL 5480.

ENGL 6260: Book Theory

ENGL 6260: Book Theory — This graduate seminar explores the book, an object that documents, represents, and mediates the human experience. Organized around the functions of the material codex—as body, as text, as tool, and as object—our exploration will consider the myriad ways that the book facilitates connection between its maker and its user. Seminar meetings will encompass both discussion and experiential hands-on learning, including paper- and book-making labs and sessions in OSU’s Special Collections. Assignments and readings will ask students to engage with a wide range of genres (including the envelope verse of Emily Dickinson, the field guide, and the poetry chapbook) and with an equally wide range of work by critical theorists and artists, from Walter Benjamin’s “On Unpacking My Library” to Richard de Bury’s fourteenth-century Philobiblon and Andrew Norman Wilson’s ScanOps project. This is not a book history course (though it will, by necessity, consider the history of the book); instead, our central objective will be to consider how the book mediates our experience of knowledge. This seminar is intentionally interdisciplinary in its methodology and structure. In its attention to the book as aesthetic and functional object, it will be particularly relevant to graduate students in literature, design, history, creative writing, and art history, but participants from any discipline are warmly welcomed. Students may choose from an array of options for their final project, including both traditional and creative work.

ENGL 2413: Exploring Literature

ENGL 2413: Exploring Literature — From ancient folklore and Gothic novels to contemporary film, television, and #BookTok sensations, vampires haunt literature and popular culture. In this introduction to literature, we’ll explore a diverse array of fiction, poetry, and contemporary media that bring monsters, mysteries, and the supernatural to life. Why do vampire stories—like vampires themselves— keep coming back? What makes Gothic and horror narratives so fun, frightening, and hard to forget? How do tales of the monstrous and the uncanny help us think about power, desire, identity, and what it means to be human? As we explore these questions, we’ll learn how different literary genres work and unpack how scary stories do serious cultural work. Along the way, you’ll hone critical interpretation skills that you can use to understand and interrogate not only literature, but the culture and media that surround you all the time.

ENGL 3083: Global Eco Storytelling

ENGL 3083: Global Eco Storytelling

ENGL 4400: Caribbean Speculative Literature

ENGL 4400: Caribbean Speculative Literature — We will explore a powerful body of Caribbean art and literature that confronts the ongoing legacies of colonialism. A particular focus of the course will be Caribbean speculative fiction, which transforms folklore, science fiction, horror, and magical realism into tools for survival, joy, resistance, and migration.

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Applied Linguistics (PhD)

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Rhetoric and Writing Studies (MA, PhD)

Screen Studies (MA, PhD)

TESOL (MA, Certificate)