ENG 2012 - Fall 2026 - Udeh-Ubaka

This course is designed to help students understand what English Studies includes and to practice the kinds of work they’ll keep doing in upper-level courses: close reading, annotation and analysis, drafting, workshop-based feedback, revision, and learning the basic vocabulary of thesis and argumentation. With a focus on contemporary world literature, the course asks students to read “English” as a global field rather than a single national tradition. That means spending time with recent texts shaped by such ideas as translation, migration, postcolonial and diasporic life, and practicing how to write clearly about what those contexts do to meaning. Students will learn to read for craft and context, and to use evidence from primary texts alongside scholarship and other secondary sources to develop an original project that speaks to a particular field, question, or public conversation. We will draw on writings from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jesmyn Ward, Lorrie Moore, Mohsin Hamid, Han Kang, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li, and Zadie Smith, amongst others, as a way to ground the course’s core goal: training students in the interpretive and writing practices that define the discipline, using texts that feel urgent and current.