Course Descriptions
Summer 2026 Course Descriptions
General course descriptions can be found in the English Catalog
Summer 2026 Courses
ENG 101.01: Exploring Writing in Academic Contexts
CRN: 50728
Asynchronous
Instructor: Tabitha Omanano
Regardless of your prior experience with writing, English 101 has a lot to offer you at the outset of your college career. This course is designed to give you focused experience and ample practice writing in a variety of contexts, situations, and genres so you can gain confidence and ability as a writer. The focus of this course will be to help you progress in your writing skills as well as provide a safe space for you to share your progress with others. In particular, this version of English 101 will help you reflect on your writing process—that is, your writing habits, routines, and strategies—and will ask you to try new things as a writer so you can develop a process that will work for you across the next several years of your education. It will also invite you to become more aware of the decisions you make as a writer as you approach both familiar and new writing situations; it will ask you to contribute to ongoing conversations on topics that interest you; and it will give you experience with the challenging but rewarding practice of giving and receiving feedback to improve your own and your classmates’ writing.
ENG 103.01: Essentials of Professional and Business Writing
CRN: 50730
Asynchronous
Instructor: Henriikka Koivisto
This course focuses on written skills needed for workplace success. It emphasizes process strategies for clear, concise, and accurate messages. Students will develop skills in producing professional documents, analyzing the writing of others, and collaborating on written assignments.
ENG 103.02: Essentials of Professional and Business Writing
CRN: 50731
Asynchronous
Instructor: Mohammed Ataullah Nuri
Whatever line of work you choose to pursue after college, good writing skills will serve you well. Clear communication of instructions, information, and requests is essential for business to function; in addition, good writing will help you present yourself as polished and competent. In this course, we will focus on the written skills needed for workplace success, emphasizing process strategies for clear, concise, and accurate communication that can be applied in a wide variety of professional and business settings. We will also develop skills in producing specific types of professional documents, analyzing the writing of others, and collaborating on written assignments. In addition, we will examine how to use AI tools responsibly and effectively, as well as the different opportunities and challenges associated with the integration of AI in business communication.
ENG 115.01: Literature off the Page
CRN: 50732
Asynchronous
Instructor: Anne Malin Ringwalt
In Literature Off the Page, we will use our asynchronous, virtual format to explore poetry, interdisciplinary performance, and art/activism that wields language as just one tool in the service of a broader communication about the human experience. We will explore the (often fabricated) division between artist and audience as we develop language, performance, and experiments that articulate questions we hold about justice, belonging, transformation, and community, as we seek to listen to and respond to each other.
ENG 123.01: Speaking Out for Change: Advocacy Communication Across Contexts
CRN: 50733
Asynchronous
Instructor: Caroline Turner
This course develops students’ abilities to listen, speak, and write effectively in public contexts, with a focus on advocacy and civic engagement. Students analyze how communication operates across interpersonal, professional, and digital spaces, paying particular attention to embodied and multimodal delivery. Emphasis is placed on audience awareness, ethical persuasion, and the role of voice in democratic life.
ENG 140.01: Literature, Health & Wellness
CRN: 50734
Asynchronous
Instructor: Christie Cary
How do stories help us understand mental health? What can literature offer when experiences of illness, grief, burnout, or healing feel difficult to name? This course invites students to explore how literature represents mental health, wellness, and care across novels, short stories, poetry, and personal narratives. Through close reading and discussion, we’ll examine how writers give voice to emotional experiences often shaped by silence or stigma, and how cultural contexts influence what it means to be “well.”
We’ll read works by authors such as Sylvia Plath, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Ted Chiang, among others, considering how literature explores depression, anxiety, grief, identity, and healing with nuance and care. Rather than approaching mental health as a problem to be solved, the course emphasizes storytelling as a space for reflection, connection, and ethical engagement.
ENG 215.01: Literature and Film
CRN: 50735
Asynchronous
Instructor: Brytani Raymond
Selected short stories, novels, plays, film scripts and their film versions, with emphasis on rendering literary values into film.
ENG 219.01: Journalism I: Fundamentals of Newswriting
CRN: 50736
Asynchronous
Instructor: Elma Sabo
Want a peek into the world of journalism? This course provides it. You’ll learn what makes something news and how journalists deliver it. By writing in several journalism forms, you’ll pick up basic skills that can help you when writing in other classes, during internships, or at your workplace after graduation. You’ll also get better at fact-checking and at noticing bias. Some students who have taken this course have gone on to work in journalism or public relations. All students should leave the course with a better understanding of journalism and its role in society.
MAC Written Communication
ENG 310.01: Young Adult Literature
CRN: 50737
Asynchronous
Instructor: Jeanie Reynolds
This course focuses on the critical study, evaluation, and censorship within the YA genre. We will examine the history of censorship in general and the most recent upsurge of book challenges. We will consider modes and themes found in the literature; ways to critically consider the texts, write about and support your thinking about modern-day censorship and what that means as citizens.
ENG 359.01: Contemporary Poetry
CRN: 50738
Asynchronous
Instructor: Terry Kennedy
British and American poetry 1945 to present. Emphasis on themes and styles, with particular attention given to classical sources, world history, and modern innovations in technique.
ENG 380.01: Literature and the Environment: Postapocalyptic Anglophone Fiction and the Anthropocene
CRN: 50739
Asynchronous
Instructor: Christian Moraru
This is an online, asynchronous, and upper-division English course that focuses on recent Anglophone postapocalyptic fiction and its efforts to extrapolate from our present and recent past to project heuristically, critically, and otherwise a planetary future marred if not irrevocably compromised by the environmental disasters that have marked the Anthropocene and its various “developmental” narratives all over the world. In this class, we will discuss novels by well-known and emerging authors such as Cormack McCarthy, Ian McEwan, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Omar El Akkad. Brief essays, one per novel, with each response 25% of the final grade. Work will be done on Canvas.