Spring 2026 Topics Courses, Department of English, CSUSB
English 3280 - Disability Literature
MW 9-10:15 am, online synchronous
Prof. Gina Hanson
This course explores the treatment of disability in literature across genres, time periods, and cultural contexts. Our exploration begins with disability as a lived experience and social construct and then moves into what literary depictions of disability tell us about the expectations we put on human bodies in any given space and time. We will consider how representations of disability function within stories, poems, and other literary works, and how these narratives shape and reflect public perceptions of the disabled body. We will read works by well-known authors like Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker, and Raymond Carver, as well as lesser-known contemporary authors attempting to re-envision disability within their literary works.
This course will also draw upon conversations from within Disability Studies, engaging with critical frameworks for understanding intersectionality, ableism, and accessibility. To this end, the assignments in this course will be grounded in alternative forms of assessment, designed to help us think about all of these disability-related issues in today’s college classrooms.
English 3520 Writing Children’s Literature
TR 9-10:15 am, online synchronous
Prof. Gina Hanson
This course looks at how to craft stories for children, adolescents, and teens. We will consider important aspects of writing for children like age-appropriate content, accessible language, wordplay, world-building, and character development, as well as publishing aspects unique to the world of children's books. We will explore many different genres and forms from picture books to short plays, short stories to concept books and early readers. Students will produce several short works and practice adapting content for young audiences.
English 3600 Writing in Prison Archives
TR 9-10:15 am online synchronous
Prof. Alexandra Cavallaro
In this course, we will examine the writing in archival collections from prison settings, including the Poston, AZ Internment camp, The Visiting Room, and The American Prison Newspaper Collection. Through these collections, we will consider the role that reading and writing play in these institutions, how it is linked to the construction and maintenance of identity, and the social practices that surround reading and writing in these spaces.
Together, we will ask: How might the form or content of archives invent, challenge, or narrate knowledge of the past? How do archives silence? How might we (re)present archival collections to the community as a form of public knowledge-making? Upon completion of this course, students will have a better understanding of scholarly conversations surrounding archival work; an understanding of the relationship between writing, identity, and social action; a familiarity with archival research methods; and the ability to conduct independent and collaborative archival research and (re)presentation.
English 4030 English Literature of the Tudor/Stuart Era
TR 2:30-3:45 pm, classroom
Prof. Jenny Andersen
This course will consider literature in relationship to larger questions surrounding the efforts of English monarchs to project images of legitimacy. We will examine how portrait painters fashioned the image of Queen Elizabeth in the course of her reign. What repositories of symbolism did artists draw on? Similarly, in the literature of courtly entertainments, drama, and political libels, what myths, memories, or religious symbols did writers evoke?
We will learn about cultural tensions and conflicts of the period through an immersive role-play game. Students who play stage actors will experience the protection that elite patronage affords and learn about the creative and collaborative side hustles that many actors were involved in. As actors from two prominent theater companies, Lord Strange’s Men and the Lord Admiral’s Men, they compete for a license to show a play by Christopher Marlowe or William Shakespeare after a plague-stricken London re-opens the theaters in 1592. They pitch their plays to the Commission of the Revels, learning to promote drama for its commercial or ideological appeal. Students who play the roles of royal counselors, lawyers, and clergymen serving as members of the Commission of the Revels learn about court rivalries and competing ideological interests such as promoting the Tudor dynasty or enforcing religious orthodoxy.
English 5130 Prose of Interrogation & Witness
TR 1-2:15 pm, hybrid (Tuesday in person, Thursday online synchronous)
Prof. Angela Peñaredondo
This course will examine craft devices, aesthetic and theories that exist in the unsettled terrains between creative nonfiction (CNF) and prose poetry. This course will look closely at contemporary and hybrid prose and CNF and investigate how these literary structures overlap to produce innovative, compelling prose.
What are the boundaries and crossovers of creative nonfiction and prose poetry? How have they significantly informed each other? When these genres meet in the liminal space what becomes combustible? How can a writer move seamlessly between a body of prose poems and that of the hybrid essay or memoir? In this class, we will explore and emulate a diversity of approaches and strategies that take place within innovative and progressive prose poetry and CNF. We will study new developments within these genres, the writers who write them and how the meeting of these works create a space for reflection, radical inquiry and interrogation within the self and the collective.
English 5150 Write Essays, Do Murders: Dark Academia in Literature and Visual Arts
MW 4-5:15 pm, online synchronous
Prof. Ann Garascia
Midnight, October 5th 1869: Poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti nervously waits as a group of laborers unearth the coffin of his beloved wife and muse, the ginger-haired Lizzie Siddal. The reason? Seven years ago, Rossetti had melodramatically cast his poetry manuscript into Siddal’s casket as a final goodbye. Except now Rossetti wanted those poems back, especially “Jenny,” a dramatic monologue about a wayward university student. On opening the coffin, the gravediggers witnessed Siddal (supposedly) perfectly preserved, her auburn tresses cradling the poems worm-eaten right through the heart of “Jenny.”
A vampirically beautiful corpse. A moldy manuscript. A well-dressed artist committing crimes for his perfect poetic meter. Rossetti’s midnight romp exemplifies the peculiar blend of humanities and horror that will come to form “Dark Academia’s” signature style in the mid-2010’s. Now recognizable as a born-digital subculture and aesthetic, Dark Academia’s world view is best described as “traditional-academic-with-a-gothic-edge” (New York Times 2020). This section of ENG 5150 takes as its focus Dark Academia in its different literary, visual, material, and digital forms. Our readings will feature university settings and student protagonists who find themselves navigating both the trials of academic life and obstacles more supernatural or deadly. Texts may include: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction, R.F. Kuang’s Babel, Dario Argento’s Suspiria, and Michael Lehmann’s Heathers. Questions that we will consider: how do our readings reinforce, or undo, Dark Academia’s romanticized depictions of exclusive and unattainable models of university education? How do university systems replicate imperialist, classist, and heteronormative frameworks? Conversely, where does Dark Academia open spaces for queer and anti-imperialist expressions? And how might we, as scholars at a California public university, grapple with the gap between Dark Academia’s nostalgic collegiate experiences and our own contemporary university cultures?
English 5150 Misfits, Rebels and Queers!
TR 10:30-11:45 am, classroom
Prof. Omar Moran
Historically, the term “misfit” has been used as a derogatory term to describe anyone that doesn’t adhere to the values and behaviors of mainstream society. Before becoming an identifier of pride, the term “queer” was a marker of “strangeness,” reflecting a person’s difference and incompatibility with conventional norms. Existing outside the margins of what is applauded and safe, these incongruous lives (defined arbitrarily by those in power), have had to forge their own identities by rebelling against, and reshaping, political environments that connive at superiority and obligate adherence to traditional ways of being. While some literary and cinematic works have depicted the misfit/queer/rebel in ignorant and prejudicial ways, this comparative literature and film course will offer extensive counterexamples that substitute negative portrayals of misfits with championing and empathetic ones, and/or depict them as ordinary members of society with the same virtues and flaws as other human beings. Among considered works will be: The Day of the Locust (West), Freaks (Browning), Rebel Without a Cause (Ray), Giovanni’s Room (Baldwin), Gender Queer (Kobabe), Tales of Ordinary Madness (Bukowski), V for Vandetta (Moore), Borderlands (Anzaldua), Punk Poetry (Clark), When My Ghost Sings (Fraser), All About My Mother (Almodovar), Transgender Warriors (Fineberg), Rat Bohemia (Schulman), Howl (Ginsberg), A Man Called Ove (Backman), Polyester (Waters), Rebel, Rebel (Bowie), What it Feels Like for a Girl (Madonna), Django Unchained (Tarantino), Juno (Cody), Promising Young Woman (Fennel), Black Peculiar (Queen), The Cancer Journals (Lorde), Verge (Yuknavitch), and Augaries of Innocence (Smith).
English 5600 Producing the Newsletter! (Studies in Professional Writing)
MW 9-10:15 am, hybrid (Monday in person, Tuesday online asynchronous)
Prof. Jasmine Lee
Are you a writer or designer? Are you interested in public and professional writing? Are you an enthusiastic English student who wants to help shape our department’s public face moving forward? If so, please enroll in ENG 5600: Producing the Newsletter!
In this class we’ll work together to reboot the English department newsletter. We’ll look at previous versions of the newsletter, explore other examples of the genre, and craft a vision for the newsletter’s next iteration. Guided by our vision, we’ll write, edit, layout, and publish an issue over the course of the semester. No experience needed! Bring your ideas and your energy, and I’ll see you in the workroom!