English
Be part of a storied history.
The English Department will introduce you to the richness of literature in English and train you in critical analysis of its formal, thematic, and cultural complexities. The program provides a broad sampling of literature from different historical periods and national contexts. Through associated instruction in a foreign language, you’ll get a better understanding of linguistic and cultural diversity. This major or minor will also improve your ability to communicate ideas about literature in both oral and written forms.
CLASSES YOU MIGHT TAKE
Indigenous Science Fiction: (Re)making Worlds
This discussion-based seminar surveys science fiction written by indigenous authors in what are now the U.S., Canada, and Australia. We investigate by what means and to what ends this particular genre has been taken up by indigenous peoples both to reflect on their settler-colonial pasts and presents and to imagine decolonial futures.
Speculative Slavery and Liberatory Fiction
This course introduces the study and genre of Black speculative fiction and Afrofuturism, through the lens of narratives focused on liberation/freedom. Liberatory fiction pushes the genre of Afrofuturism further to create space for the imagination to envision alternate futures and pasts, that rewrite history to aid in the process of liberation for black lives.
Zombies
This lecture survey attempts to answer why the zombie has become such a fixture in contemporary literature and cinema. We track this figure across its many incarnations–from its late-eighteenth-century appearance in ethnographic fictions growing out of the modern cultures of racialized slavery in the Americas right up to twenty-first-century Hollywood blockbusters in which the origins of the figure in the cultures of racialized slavery are perhaps not overt yet continue to manifest.
Faculty Spotlight
Join the Club
Hopkins students are eager to pursue their interests outside the classroom. With 450+ student-led organizations, here are just a few you could join:
