Fall 2025 Course Descriptions
English Program and Writing Program
Penn State Abington
ENGLISH MAJOR (WRITING AND LITERATURE IN CONTEXT) REQUIREMENTS:
ENGL 200 or 201: ENGL 201
Pre-1800: ENGL 440
Post-1800: ENGL 455
Literature, Writing, or Rhetoric: ENGL 050, ENGL 183N, ENGL 184, ENGL 201, ENGL 213, ENGL 215, ENGL 223N, ENGL 228, ENGL 229, ENGL 413, ENGL 415, ENGL 419, ENGL 420, ENGL 435, ENGL 440
Diversity: ENGL 455, ENGL 487W
Senior Seminar: ENGL 487W
WRITING MINOR COURSES: ENGL 050, ENGL 213, ENGL 215, ENGL 413, ENGL 415, ENGL 419, ENGL 420.
ENGLISH MINOR COURSES: ENGL 050, ENGL 183N, ENGL 184, ENGL 201, ENGL 213, ENGL 215, ENGL 223N, ENGL 228, ENGL 229, ENGL 413, ENGL 415, ENGL 419, ENGL 420, ENGL 435, ENGL 440, ENGL 455, ENGL 487W
ENGL 050: Introduction to Creative Writing (GA)
Professor Heise
Want to write, but aren’t quite sure how to get started or what to write about? This course is meant to ignite your interests, hone your skills, and introduce you to the foundational elements of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction so as to set free your imagination. You will learn to craft images, music, lines, and narrative in the poetry we practice. In fiction, you will learn how to create characters, develop themes, modulate tone and atmosphere, plot a conflict, and manipulate setting. And you will learn to translate and reconstruct personal experience, memory, and research into arguments, scenes, and narratives for creative nonfiction. Along the way, our conversations will turn to the writing and revision process, to why one writes in the first place, and to age-old inexhaustible questions, such as, what are the functions and purposes of poetry, short story, and the essay, what is the difference between truth and fact, and what are the ethics of writing about our own lives and the lives of others. In this course, you’re a writer. And that means you will be writing all the time in an exercise of imagination and perseverance. ENGL 050 welcomes all students interested in creative writing: no previous creative-writing experience is necessary.
ENGL. 050: Introduction To Creative Writing (GA)
Professor Jimmy J. Pack Jr.
In our Introduction to Creative Writing class we will explore our artistic sides by playing with language, plot, history, and character through the genres of fiction, creative nonfiction, script writing, and poetry. Two concepts to keep in mind while you work on your manuscripts: writing is mostly the act of revision, and that all writers start out by imitating those writers they love the most. You will be given ample time to revise your work, and we’ll spend the first month of our class time reading the work of established writers (Toni Morrison, Raymond Carver, John Keats, Diana Garcia, Anne Sexton, Martin Espada, Gish Jen, Thomas McGuane, Zora Neale Hurston, Haruki Murakami, Ray Bradbury, Bryan Washington, and Richard Wright, among others), and then the rest of the semester in a workshop environment where students will submit their work to a class critique. Our workshops will be run in a civil, encouraging manner meant to assist each writer with revising their works. We will all be working as a team to create publishable works of art.
ENGL 183N: The Cold War in Literature, Politics, and History (GH)
Professor Jimmy J. Pack Jr
At 8:15 a.m. local time in Hiroshima, Japan, the atomic bomb Little Boy was released from the Super Fortress Enola Gay. The bomb detonated 1,900 feet above the city with the resulting blast destroying everything within a one-mile radius of the epicenter. Estimates state that approximately 70% of the buildings in Hiroshima were destroyed. Conservative estimates put the total deaths at about 130,000. As the now iconic mushroom cloud rose over the Japanese landscape, so, too, did the specter of nuclear annihilation rise over the whole of the planet. After the subsequent bombing of Nagasaki just three days later, it became apparent to the entire world that the days of direct combat between world powers may well be over, and that a new age of unprecedented potential destruction was set to begin. It was the dawning of the nuclear era and the start of a new type of paranoia in the mind of every citizen of the world. In our English 183N class we will study primary texts, both fiction and nonfiction, that explore how the Cold War evolved and the effects of Civil Defense on American society. We will also view films that accurately captured the tension and global fear of mutually assured destruction.
ENGL 184: The Short Story English
Professor Linda Miller
Throughout time people have told stories in order to comprehend themselves and their history, or simply for the pure joy of recreating mutually felt human experiences. Such storytelling began within an oral tradition and then assumed a written literary form. Edgar Allan Poe (an American writer during the early 19th century) was probably the first to define the short story as its own literary genre, and stories written since Poe’s time might be judged by his succinct definition. A tale should be short enough to read in one sitting, he said, and be artfully structured so as to create a unified impression. This class will consider the major short story writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, with a primary focus on those 20th century writers (many of them American) who have been the most influential in shaping this genre. We will consider the historical and cultural contexts for these stories while primarily analyzing them on their own artistic terms. What do these stories have to say about what it means to be human, and HOW do they go about saying it? The sophisticated textual critic will consider all facets of each story’s structural form in order to determine its predominant themes. Lectures and class discussions will assist students in developing their reading and interpretive skills, and students will be graded on their ability to communicate these interpretations both orally and in writing.
English 201: What Is Literature (GH)
Professor Naydan
What is literature and how does it work? How do literary texts differ from supposedly non-literary ones? What forms does literature take and why do these forms matter? And how do we go about investigating the wide range of possible meanings that literary texts may have? This course will focus on these among other questions about the nature and features of literature. It will familiarize students with theories and practices that are foundational to studying different kinds of literary texts and contexts. Specifically, we will focus on post-1945 U.S. literature written in different genres, namely a novel, a novella, a memoir, a play, short stories, and poetry. Authors will likely include Alison Bechdel, Don DeLillo, Ling Ma, Thomas Pynchon, Claudia Rankine, and others. We will also read a handful of brief works by critical theorists to gain insight into the different kinds of lenses we might bring to literary works and the world. Through reading and writing about literature and critical theory, we will acquire technical vocabularies used by literature scholars and literary historians. We will also develop an understanding of how literary works operate and how responsible scholars can and do make meaning of them.
ENGL 213: Introduction to Poetry Writing (GA)
Professor Heise
In this class we will immerse ourselves in the writing, reading, and study of poetry. The poetry you write during the semester will form the basis of the workshop—your small community of fellow writers whose work we will read, debate, praise, and critique. The workshops are the heart of this course, but they will be complemented with discussions of fundamental elements of craft, such as voice, image, lineation, and form that will help you improve your own writing, as well as help you talk about each other’s poems with greater precision and insight. Also this term, we will take up expansive questions of poetics that will shake up and deepen what you think poetry is and can be. We will do this by reading and analyzing manifestos, essays, and statements from key movements in twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry and by engaging in a series of poetic experimentations. Finally, we will also read and assess recently published collections of poetry that we will study in order to learn how they move us in body and imagination. These works, along with everything else we do this semester, have one aim: to make you a better writer by developing and advancing your arsenal of poetic skills. This class is “stacked,” which means you can enroll in it at the introductory level (ENGL 212) or the advanced level (ENGL 413). Students enrolled in ENGL 413 will have additional and / or longer assignments.
ENGL 215: Introduction to Article Writing
Professor Cohen
Share your perspectives on campus and community issues! In this course, you will research, compose, edit, and publish articles for our digital news outlet The Abington Sun. Students in ENGL 215 will be expected to conduct primary research--conducting interviews and analyzing data, in order to generate ideas for stories of interest to our campus community. Students will pitch their story ideas weekly to an audience of their peers, and decide collectively with editors which stories will move forward. Over the course of the semester, each student should plan to produce and publish several news articles and feature pieces, improving writing skills in a hands-on process as they work to publish well-researched, impactful articles. Subjects for articles range from politics to current events, sports and arts and culture. Feel free to browse past topics at The Abington Sun. If you like to write, are interested in learning and writing about current events, and want to see your work published, ENGL 215/415 is the place for you! If you haven’t worked with us before, you should enroll in ENGL 215. If you’re a veteran of our writing staff who wants to further hone your skills, you should register for ENGL 415.
ENGL 223N: Shakespeare: Page, Stage, and Screen (IL, GA, GH, Interdomain)
Professor Nicosia
“He was not of an age but for all time!” Ben Jonson, a poet and playwright, wrote these words to celebrate the life and work of William Shakespeare. This course is designed to introduce students to Shakespeare and his world. Students of all levels are welcome and no prior experience is required or assumed. We will read six of Shakespeare’s plays, including some of his most celebrated. As we read these plays, we will analyze their genre, dramatic structure, and language as well as how they engage with social and political issues of Shakespeare’s time and our own. We will consider issues of performance, film adaptation, and publication history through interactive assignments.
ENGL 229: Digital Studies (GH)
(Stacked with DIGIT 100 Introduction to Digital Humanities)
Professor Nicosia
This course will introduce students to concepts, methods, and resources for digital studies and the digital humanities, meaning both the study of culture using digital means and the study of digital culture and digital cultural objects in themselves. In some cases, digitization and digital production enrich existing approaches to English studies; in other cases, they present new paradigms and practices, requiring the cultivation of new analytic and theoretical approaches along with new technical skills. Accordingly, the course will emphasize both that enrichment of existing approaches to English studies, in the use of computers to present and analyze English-language materials preserved in the past, and the application of computing to the creation of expressive cultural artifacts unique to networked and programmable media. This course will challenge you to experiment with new techniques, and students who are resourceful, creative, and energetic will find this course an ideal forum to test their curiosity and inquisitiveness.
The central project of this course will be to create a student-generated transcription of a digitized cookery manuscript held at Penn State Libraries Eberly Family Special Collections. For the first ten-weeks of the course, we will collaboratively transcribe a manuscript and discuss readings about digital studies, debates in the digital humanities, recipe manuscripts, cookery and medicine, and labor and digital projects to understand both our object of study and how we have come to interact with it today. During the final five weeks of the course, students will work individually or in teams on multimodal projects that research, curate, and share our collective knowledge about the manuscript.
ENGL 228 Introduction to Disability Studies
Professor Cohen
Introduction to Disability Studies provides an introduction to and discussion of the ways scholars talk about representations of dis/ability, as well as the work that those representations do in our culture. My aim for the course is that we are all better able to recognize and interpret that work and how it shapes our awareness and expectations of ourselves and the people we share space with. To that end, we will be reading some writing in the fields of both Rhetoric and Disability Studies as well as reading and viewing representations of illness and disability in popular media. Class discussion will necessarily include difficult topics, including stigma, illness, and death. Though some of these discussions and representations are potentially troubling, part of the work of the course will be to understand how the stories we encounter shape our thoughts and feelings on these topics.
ENGL 413: Advanced Poetry Writing
Professor Heise
In this course we will immerse ourselves in the writing, reading, and study of poetry. The poetry you write during the semester will form the basis of the workshop—your small community of fellow writers whose work we will read, debate, praise, and critique. The workshops are the heart of this class, but they will be complemented with discussions of fundamental elements of craft, such as voice, image, lineation, and form that will help you improve your own writing, as well as help you talk about each other’s poems with greater precision and insight. Also this term, we will take up expansive questions of poetics that will shake up and deepen what you think poetry is and can be. We will do this by reading and analyzing manifestos, essays, and statements from key movements in twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry and by engaging in a series of poetic experimentations. Finally, we will also read and assess recently published collections of poetry that we will study in order to learn how they move us in body and imagination. These works, along with everything else we do this semester, have one aim: to make you a better writer by developing and advancing your arsenal of poetic skills. This class is “stacked,” which means you can enroll in it at the introductory level (ENGL 212) or the advanced level (ENGL 413). Students enrolled in ENGL 413 will have additional and / or longer assignments.
ENGL 415: Advanced Nonfiction Writing
Professor Cohen
Share your perspectives on campus and community issues! In this course, you will research, compose, edit, and publish articles for our digital news outlet The Abington Sun. Students in ENGL 415 will build on the skills they learned in ENGL 215 to conduct primary research--conducting interviews and analyzing data, in order to generate ideas for stories of interest to our campus community. Students will pitch their story ideas weekly to an audience of their peers, and decide collectively with editors which stories will move forward. Over the course of the semester, each student should plan to produce and publish several news articles and feature pieces, improving writing skills in a hands-on process as they work to publish well-researched, impactful articles. Subjects for articles range from politics to current events, sports and arts and culture. Feel free to browse past topics at The Abington Sun. If you like to write, are interested in learning and writing about current events, and want to see your work published, ENGL 215/415 is the place for you! If you haven’t worked with us before, you should enroll in ENGL 215. If you’re a veteran of our writing staff who wants to further hone your skills, you should register for ENGL 415.
ENGL 419: Advanced Business Writing
Professor Esposito
This course focuses on writing to a business audience after closely evaluating the target audience and writing purpose. Classical appeals will be considered when writing persuasive business documents, document formatting for quick and easy processing by busy readers will be used for all documents, and collaborative writing experience will be gained from group writing and presentation assignments. This course provides information and practice on various types of business writing including memos, letters, proposals, meeting minutes, project status reports, and professional reports. If students in the class want to update their job search documents, we can include this work in the course. We will also develop business communications using other mediums including audio, video, flyers, and web pages.
ENGL 420: Writing for the Web
Professor Rigilano
Most of what we write is mediated by digital technology, and much of what we read is on a screen, but we rarely reflect on how these contexts impact our lives as writers and readers. In this class, we will not only critically reflect on these conditions and processes, but we will actively and creatively construct texts designed to succeed in online environments. By engaging with scholarship in media theory and digital rhetoric, students will be better able to navigate and interpret the virtual texts. By writing for various web platforms, in a variety of genres, and for various audiences, students will gain practical expertise in digital composition. Writing in 21st - century digital contexts is necessarily multimodal, so students will consider not just written language, but also images, video, and audio. Major assignments may include: a social media ethnography, a web magazine article, a professional website, and a review blog/podcast.
ENGL 435: The American Short Story
Professor Linda Miller
Throughout time people have told stories in order to comprehend themselves and their history, or simply for the pure joy of recreating mutually felt human experiences. Such storytelling began within an oral tradition and then assumed a written literary form. Edgar Allan Poe (an American writer during the early 19th century) was probably the first to define the short story as its own literary genre, and stories written since Poe’s time might be judged by his succinct definition. A tale should be short enough to read in one sitting, he said, and be artfully structured so as to create a unified impression. This class will consider the major short story writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, with a primary focus on those 20th century writers (many of them American) who have been the most influential in shaping this genre. We will consider the historical and cultural contexts for these stories while primarily analyzing them on their own artistic terms. What do these stories have to say about what it means to be human, and HOW do they go about saying it? The sophisticated textual critic will consider all facets of each story’s structural form in order to determine its predominant themes. Lectures and class discussions will assist students in developing their reading and interpretive skills, and students will be graded on their ability to communicate these interpretations both orally and in writing.
ENGL 440: Studies in Shakespeare
Professor Nicosia
Explore the twisting comic plot of Twelfth Night, the politics of sex, power, and religion in Measure for Measure, the villainy of Macbeth, and the troubled reign of Richard II. This course is designed to deepen students’ knowledge of Shakespeare’s works through the study of the genres in which he wrote: comedy, history, tragedy, and romance. As we read Shakespeare’s plays, we will also consider how they engage with social and political issues of Shakespeare’s time as well as our own.
ENGL 455: The Victorians and Race
Professor Walters
The term “race” was used frequently during the Victorian era. It was connected to the expression of both individual ontology and national identity such that race, at this time, did come to mean “everything,” as the anatomist Robert Knox opined in 1850. While the idea of race had certainly been a preoccupation of some eighteenth-century writers, it was in the nineteenth century that the term, with its scientific inflections, truly became reified. This is certainly one of the Victorian age’s chief ironies, however. The concept of race—while certainly employed by many—was used with remarkable inconsistency in the period. In this interdisciplinary course, we will study works of mid-to-late Victorian fiction along with primary documents from the era, such as ethnological and anthropological writings. In so doing, we will examine the broad social and cultural impact of scientifically-inflected racial thought. Throughout, we will aim to contextualize and historicize the major discursive shift that favoured racial discourse in the latter half of the nineteenth century. For instance, we will examine the immense impact of racial ideology upon ideas of British Nationalism during this period—when previously nebulous signifiers, such as “Anglo-Saxon,” were imbued suddenly with seemingly precise, racial signification. We will also investigate the degree to which racialist thought influenced ideas of individual development since, as the century progressed, racial ideology came to inflect the representation of human consciousness, itself.
ENGL 487W: Senior Seminar (The Politics of English and Globalization)
Professor Grace Lee-Amuzie
How does English reinforce or challenge existing inequalities? How do ideologies of Standard English and monolingualism shape language policies and perceptions of linguistic legitimacy? How does the global dominance of English affect the identities and experiences of multilingual speakers and writers? In this Senior Seminar for Fall 2025, we’ll explore these and other important questions to examine the complex relationship between English, power, and globalization. We will study how English functions both as a tool for communication and a site of political struggle. The course will cover the historical and contemporary spread of English and its role in shaping power dynamics, identity, education, and social mobility, both locally and globally. Students will read and engage with critical perspectives on World Englishes, linguistic imperialism, native speakerism and other related topics, including contributions from underrepresented voices. We’ll analyze how English is adopted, adapted, and contested across diverse cultural and geopolitical contexts. Through readings, class discussions, research projects, and case studies from around the world, students will develop a deeper understanding of the politics of language and its impact on global communities.
