Current and Upcoming Honors Courses

English Honors Courses 2025-26

Fall 2025

ENGH 400: Renaissance Intercultural Encounters

Jennifer Wood

This course will explore various representations of Otherness as described in the Renaissance travel narrative archive and embodied in the English theater. We will approach travel literature texts (by authors including Thomas Harriot, John Smith, Anthony Sherley, Fynes Moryson, and Thomas Coryate) and dramatic works (in plays including Pericles; The Travels of the Three English Brothers; Alphonsus, King of Aragon; and A Christian Turn’d Turk) through post-colonial, sensory, and critical race theories to situate Renaissance England within a broader global/Global context. The theater and the travel writer both exchanged and relied on ideas about Other cultures—and reinforced these ideas through their inscription and performance. Yet, we will want to consider carefully how these representations were marshalled in service of a burgeoning national English identity. Questions this class will address include: How are different forms of cultural Otherness represented on the page and on the stage? What English anxieties are revealed in the travel narratives? How does the theater function as a laboratory to experiment with ideas about Otherness? How does sound play a crucial role in cross-cultural encounters recorded in the travel narrative archive and on the London stage?

Fulfills the pre-1800 and Minority, Folkloric, or Popular Literary and Cultural Traditions Requirements

Spring 2026

ENGH 400: Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond 

Eric Anderson

Undeadness takes many forms. In the American south, some of these forms—like the undead in American Horror Story: Coven (set in New Orleans), the vampires in True Blood (set in Louisiana), and the zombies in The Walking Dead (set in and around Atlanta and Alexandria) are extremely physical, sometimes eerie, and sometimes quite campy. But, embodied as they are, these undead figures also reflect political, economic, cultural, and social frictions. Undeadness in the south often appears in symbolic, psychological, and cultural forms, including the social death endured by enslaved people, the Lost Cause that resurrects the Confederacy, and the reverberations of the Indian removal crisis. In other words, undeadness is an important, useful, and flexible critical lens—very possibly more useful than its more familiar counterpart, southern gothic. In this class, we'll look into traditional, conventional notions of the southern gothic and also look beyond them, the better to cast both the south and the undead in a wide variety of lights: regional, national, transnational, racial, gendered, sexual, social, historical, haunted, post-traumatic, ecological, carceral, post-apocalyptic, and more.

ENGH 401: Honors Thesis Writing Seminar

Jacqueline Burek

This course gives students who wish to write an English honors thesis guidance in research methods, while offering the opportunity to share works in progress in a workshop format. Scholarly or creative theses are written under the supervision of the instructor and a faculty mentor with expertise in the thesis area.

Note: To enroll in ENGH 401, students need to have taken ENGH 400 and receive permission from the English Honors Coordinator. BA students with a concentration in Creative Writing may substitute ENGH 495 for ENGH 401 with permission of the instructor and Honors coordinator.

Fulfills the Apex/Capstone Requirement