Fall 2023 Courses

The Children's Literature Program offers an array of classic and contemporary topics in children's literature and young-adult studies.

ENGL 306A/W: Children’s Literature and Advanced Composition with Lecturer Tishna Asim

Investigate various themes in children’s literature, spanning multiple time periods, cultures, and schools of thought.  Experience many formats of literature—poetry, novel, short story, film, television show/episode, picture book—and visit many genres (fairy tale, quest/adventure narrative, problem novel, etc.) to pinpoint the purposes and pleasures within children’s literature.

What We're Reading

ENGL 306A/W: Children’s Literature and Advanced Composition with Lecturer Sequoia Stone

Read children’s literature that explores the highs and lows of coming-of-age as the protagonists of our texts work to understand and develop their identities apart from, yet still part of, their families, their friends, and their histories. Explore the role of creative expression (and art in general) in both individual identity and the world at large.

What We're Reading

ENGL 501: Literature for Children with Professor Joseph Thomas

Investigate the historical moment in which the texts on this syllabus were produced as well as the implicit and explicit ideology within them. Discuss how the reception to these texts may have changed over time.

What We're Reading

ENGL 502: Adolescence in Literature with Professor Lashon Daley

Read middle-grade and YA novels, alongside the groundbreaking work of prominent girlhood studies scholars, in order to investigate girlhood as both a political category and a social identity.

What We're Reading

ENGL 503: Topics in Children’s Literature with Professor Joseph Thomas

Read and discuss crucial works by J.R.R. Tolkien, including The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

What We're Reading

ENGL 606D: Precarity, Possibility Children’s Literature and YA Gothic with Professor Phillip Serrato

Learn about the efficacy of gothic as a modality for the imagination and assertion of more ameliorative forms of social existence and social relationality over and against the social horrors that it otherwise depicts.

What We're Reading