Departmental Facilities

The Department of English is located in Watson Hall, with the Departments of Classics, History, and Philosophy. Watson Hall houses the Department's secretarial and faculty offices, the graduate seminar room, and shared offices for graduate students.

Financial Assistance

The Department of English offers financial support to M.A., MPhil, and Ph.D. students in the form of Queen's Graduate Awards and teaching assistantships. Funding for MPhil students is guaranteed for two years. Funding for Ph.D. students is guaranteed for four years. Ph.D. students are also eligible to apply for teaching fellowships in the fourth year of the program.

Areas of Research

The Department offers graduate courses and thesis supervision in Interdisciplinary areas of literary research such as indigenous studies, ecological and animal studies, and gender studies, as well as in the major areas of literary history, including Medieval, Renaissance, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century, Romantic, Victorian, Modern Canadian and American literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and Literary Theory

The Queen’s University Library collections are particularly strong in Renaissance and Nineteenth-century English literature and meet the needs of graduate students working in Medieval, Eighteenth-century, and Modern literatures.

Special Collections include an outstanding collection of Dickens, as well as the personal library of Robertson Davies. The Canadiana section, based upon the Edith and Lorne Pierce collection, is one of the most impressive in the country, and the Commonwealth section has grown rapidly in recent years. The Library resources are further augmented by microfilms of books printed in the British Isles and abroad before 1700 (from lists in the Short Title Catalogue and the Wing Supplement), and a 30-volume microfilm copy of the original Stationers' Company records. Queen's Archives has substantial holdings in Canadiana from its beginnings to the contemporary day, including the works of such writers as Carman, Purdy, and Woodcock.

Degree Programs

Applicants to our graduate programs are accepted under the general regulations of the School of Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs, providing they also satisfy the requirements of the Department. Successful candidates for admission have normally completed a B.A. (Hons) degree if applying to a Master’s program, or BA (Hons) and first-class MA degrees if applying to the Doctoral program, with at least upper second-class standing and with a cumulative average in English courses of at least 80% or A- average.

Students whose native language does not include English will be required to obtain a minimum score of 109 on the TOEFL Internet-based test (TOEFL Ibt), or 7.5 on the IELTS Academic module.  For details see the department's website: Graduate, Applying. 

Faculty

Head
McKegney, S.

Coordinator of Graduate Studies
Pappano, M.

Professor
Bongie, C., Fachinger, P., Hanson, E., Johns-Putra, A., McIntire, G., McKegney, S., Morrison, R., Murray, L., Pierce, J., Ritchie, L., Ruffo, A., Schlick, Y., Straznicky, M., Willmott, G.

Associate Professor
Fanning, C., Cameron, S. B., Macfarlane, H., Pappano, M., Straker, S., Varadharajan, A., Wallace, M.

Assistant Professor
Chatterjee, R., Moriah, K., Okot Bitek, J. 

Professor Emeritus
Berg, M., Carpenter, M.W., Clark, G.R., Harland, C., Jones, M.C., King, S., Lobb, E., Lock, F., Logan, G.M., Monkman, L.G., Rae, P., Smart, C., Söderlind, S., Ware, T. 

Programs

Courses

Full courses  (6.0 credit units) designated as Studies and half courses  (3.0 credit units) designated as Topics offer the study of a single work, a group of related works, an author or authors within the period or grouping indicated. The content of these offerings will vary from year to year. Not all the courses listed below will be offered in any one year, and a few are offered infrequently. A list of expected offerings with detailed descriptions of course content will be sent to applicants as soon as it can be drawn up.  

ENGL 800 Introduction to Professional and Pedagogical Skills I 
This course introduces M.A. and M.Phil. students to the scholarly study and teaching of English literature. The emphasis will be on training Teaching Assistants. There will be practical training in research skills, essay-marking, the academic counselling of students, and first-time teaching. There will also be some consideration of academic and non-academic careers for M.A.s and MPhils. Three term-hours; fall.  

ENGL 802 Practical Criticism
This course will provide students with the necessary tools to practice and to teach "close reading" in a broad range of genres from different historical and national contexts.  Students will engage in textual analysis through a series of practical exercises combined with readings of critical essays representing different approaches to the reading of literature.  Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 803 Research Forum I  
A regularly scheduled forum in which faculty, advanced doctoral students, and visiting scholars present model research problems and methodologies for discussion. Attendance is required. Graded on a Pass/Fail basis. Various speakers.

ENGL 810 Literary Criticism
Representative critical approaches from Aristotle to the moderns will be considered with particular attention to those, which have most influenced contemporary attitudes. Not offered 2024-25. 

ENGL 811 Literary Theory I 
Not offered 2024-25.    

ENGL 813 Literary Theory III 
Topic:  Writing the Body 
This advanced interdisciplinary seminar course introduces students to contemporary readings in Black studies, Indigenous Studies, colonialism, queer and trans studies in relation to the body. We might think about the body as a physical manifestation, a material being, one in relation, one that takes up space, or not. How might we orientate ourselves as we bear witness to those whose presence clamors for attention in the social and political periphery? In this course we’ll be thinking about what it is to write the body (both as an act of legibility, and as political practice of inclusion or exclusion) first through Franz Fanon and Audre Lorde, but branching out to think with other thinkers, artists, poets, and novelists to ask: how is a body--or how are we—articulated, or not? What are the limits of legibility, of opacity? What are the archives of those whose presences remain unwritten, or unrecognized, in practices of knowledge and power? As we consider these questions collectively through the critical reading, discussion, and reflection, we hope to expand the idea of the body beyond the material form to think alongside conceptions of containment, power, and resistance. Three term-hours; winter. 

ENGL 815 Topics in Literary Study I
Topic: The Novel in the Anthropocene
Three term-hours; winter.

ENGL 816 Topics in Literary Study II
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 817 Topics in Literary Studies III 
Topic: Publishing Practicum
Description: This seminar takes students through revision and submission stages from draft essay to article publication. The first section of the course will be devoted to discussion of the differences between coursework papers and published articles, and to a presentation and peer revision cycle of each student’s work. The second section of the course will discuss how to decide where to send article submissions, how to present them, and what to expect of the process. If there is time, we will build in a conference proposal/presentation stage. Students must have a complete draft essay to bring to the start of the course and be ready to welcome reading and response from peers. Success in the course requires regular attendance, constructive participation, revision responsive to instructor and peer review, and submission to an appropriate scholarly venue for publication. Note: Doctoral students are strongly urged to enroll in this course, and while the course is open to all students, doctoral students will have enrolment priority. Three term-hours; winter.  

ENGL 818 Topics in Literary Study IV
Topic: Pulp
This course descends into the lurid world of pulp fiction in the early twentieth century, torch in hand, to explore the historical emergence of sensational genres such as crime, horror, science fiction, and fantasy adventure, in literature and comics. We will study them, curse them, and revel in them as outlandish experiments with normative ways of thinking about self and society, rivalling those of the high-culture avant-garde. We’ll consult mad scientists, muscled barbarians, woman robots, tentacled monsters, femme fatales, and many more denizens of this barely restrained, rarely woke, modern imagination. Three term-hours; winter.

ENGL 819 Introduction to Bibliography  
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 820 Anglo-Saxon and Beowulf 
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 821 Topics in Anglo-Saxon Literature I
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 822 Old Norse
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 823 Studies in Medieval Literature
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 824 Topics in Medieval Literature I
Topic: King Arthur: Medieval to Modern
This course will examine a selection of Arthurian texts, beginning with the earliest Welsh legends and then following the tradition into the present day. Works to be read include selections from major interpreters of the legend over a period of 900 years, including Geoffrey of Monmouth, Sir Thomas Malory, Alfred Lord Tennyson and T. H. White. Apart from these better-known writers, many other authors and poets have employed Arthurian themes and narratives in their work, and students will be asked to research some of these versions, and to present on the results of their research. We will thus be able to piece together a history of the tradition that includes a variety of high cultural and popular interpretations of the narrative over time. Throughout the course, we will return to the following central questions: What cultural purposes do myths of King Arthur serve? Whose values do they reflect? To what extent do they engage with the early medieval past, and to what extent with the concerns of their later interpreters? Three term-hours; winter.

ENGL 825 Topics in Medieval Literature II
Not offered 2024-25. 

ENGL 826 Topics in Medieval Literature III
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 827 Topics in Medieval Literature IV
Not offered 2024-25. 

ENGL 828 Chaucer 
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 830 Studies in Early Modern Literature and Culture
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 831 Topics in Early Modern Literature and Culture I 
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 832 Topics in Early Modern Literature and Culture II
Topic: Shakespeare and Sovereignty.
“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” wrote the Weimar Republic and later Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, at the beginning of his Political Theology in 1922. “Not all the water in the rough, rude sea can wash the balm off from an anointed king,” proclaims Shakespeare’s King Richard II, asserting his lawful kingship even as he is deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke in the play that another German jurist, Ernst Kantorowicz, used to mount a post-war critique of Schmitt’s arguments. Throughout his canon, Shakespeare demonstrates fascination with the sovereign and the basis of sovereignty, particularly as it emerges in extremis, in conditions of emergency or exception, querying from whence sovereignty derives, and how it is (re)established once consensus about its locations and norms is lost. In this course we will consider five plays by Shakespeare, Richard II, Henry IV, Parts One and Two, Measure for Measure and King Lear, in relation to two problems of modern and post-modern political theory: political theology and bio-politics as they are developed in the writings of Schmitt and Kantorowicz, as well Schmitt’s recent exponent, Giorgio Agamben, and Michel Foucault.  What is the role of divine authority, metaphysics, custom and human agency in establishing a right to rule? What is the sovereign the sovereign of?  What limitations, claims, and affordances does human embodiment impose or confer on the sovereign?  How do formal choices in dramatic representation inflect ideas about the sovereignty? The term in which we undertake this exploration will coincide with the run-up to a US election which many feel could bring the international liberal order into a state of exception. What better time to take a long view of sovereignty? Three term-hours; fall.

ENGL 833 Topics in Early Modern Literature and Culture III 
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 834 Topics in Early Modern Literature and Culture IV 
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 835 Topics in Early Modern Literature and Culture V
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 836 Topics in Early Modern Literature and Culture VI 
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 840 Studies in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 841 Topics in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature I
Topic: Eighteenth-Century Women’s Poetry
Changes in social and economic arrangements (from the court to the city, from the aristocracy to the middle class), especially developments in the publishing industry, in education, in attitudes toward publication, brought about new opportunities for women writers over the course of the “long eighteenth century” (roughly 1660-1800). This course offers an introduction to the principles of 18th-century poetry by way of questions of gender. The first half looks at famous debates about gender and authorship between male and female authors. The second half will be student-directed, looking to thematic concerns in women’s poetry specifically. Three term-hours; fall. 

ENGL 842 Topics in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature II
Topic: Epistolarity in the Eighteenth Century 
You’ve got mail! The trope of a bag of letters opened to the reader’s gaze is surprisingly common in eighteenth-century literature. This course looks at a selection of eighteenth-century letters, letter-writing manuals, famous newspaper correspondence, and fictions and dramas that depend upon letters to examine what makes epistolary form so fascinating. Texts will include works by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett, and others. Three term-hours; winter

ENGL 843 Topics in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature III
Not offered 2024-25. 

ENGL 844 Topics in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature IV
Not offered 2024-25. 
ENGL 850 Studies in Romantic Literature 
Not offered 2024-25. 

ENGL 851 Topics in Romanticism I​
Not offered 2024-25. 

ENGL 852 Topics in Romanticism II 
Not offered 2024-25. 

ENGL 853 Topics in Romanticism III
Not offered 2023-24.

ENGL 854 Topics in Romanticism IV
Topic: The Literature of Addiction. 
According to Stuart Walton in Out of It (2002), some addicts commit suicide and others overdose. There is, however, a third group that manages to avoid both these fates and stay alive. Its members are “the ones who may well go on to write abuse confessionals”, Walton adds, “and each is a distant descendant of De Quincey.” This course examines De Quincey’s seminal narratives of drug addiction, including Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and its sequel, Suspiria de Profundis. It then explores the work of some of De Quincey’s major “descendants”, including Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Virginia Woolf, Malcolm Lowry, Aldous Huxley, and Carlyn Zwarenstein. Three term-hours; fall.

ENGL 855 Studies in Victorian Literature 
Not offered 2024-25. 

ENGL 856 Topics in Victorian Literature I
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 857 Topics in Victorian Literature II
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 858 Topics in Victorian Literature III
Not offered 2024-25.
 

ENGL 859 Topics in Victorian Literature IV
Topic: Victorian Gothic 
Three term-hours; spring.

ENGL 860 Studies in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture 
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 861 Topics in Modernism I
Not offered 2024-25.
ENGL 862 Topics in Modernism II 
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 863 Topics in Modernism III
Topic: Modernist Sacred Ecologies
Friedrich Nietzsche writes in 1882—the year both Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were born—“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. . . . With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent?” (The Gay Science). His startling pronouncements had enduring effects on nascent modernist aesthetics and ethics, and most critics agree that Nietzsche helped to herald an age of spiritual and religious uncertainty. Still, there is another side to this story. Interest in the religious, in various forms of divinity, in mysticism, and in spiritualities remained strong, and new forms of attention to the sacred are also central to modernist literature. At the same time, the decades following the 1880s also saw increasing awareness about the precarity of the natural world. The term “ecology” (Ökologie) was coined in 1866 by the German scientist, Ernst Haeckel, and this presaged new understandings about the delicate balance between the human and the natural environment.  In this course we will consider how a range of modernist writers render sacred experience in juxtaposition and in dialogue with both local and broader ecologies. Our focus will primarily be poetry, but we will also read fiction, philosophy, theology, theory, and criticism. Writers will likely include Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, Rabindranath Tagore, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, E.E. Cummings, Evelyn Underhill, Virginia Woolf, Friedrich Nietzsche, the Buddha, Augustine of Hippo, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Three term-hours; spring.

ENGL 864 Topics in Modernism IV
Not offered 2024-25.
ENGL 865 Topics in Contemporary Literature and Culture I 
Not offered 2024-25.
 

ENGL 866 Topics in Contemporary Literature and Culture II
Topic: History and the Contemporary Novel
This course will focus on the historical dimension of the contemporary novel.  We will explore historical fiction, the novel’s engagement with history and with questions of historical truth, and the interplay between the personal and the historical in recent fiction writing.  Works for this course are chosen to represent a broad historical and geographical range. Theorizations of the historical novel as well as the historical contexts of works on the syllabus will be studied in detail.  The international list of authors on the syllabus (from the U.K., Ireland, New Zealand, Israel, Spain, the U.S., South Africa and Germany) will include works by the following authors:  John Fowles, Claire Keegan, Damon Galgut, Lloyd Jones, A. B. Yehoshua, Javier Cercas, Jenny Erpenbeck, Graeme Mcrae Burnet, and Deborah Levy. Three term-hours; fall.

ENGL 867 Topics in Contemporary Literature and Culture III
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 868 Topics in Contemporary Literature and Culture IV
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 870 Studies in Canadian Literature 
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 871 Topics in Canadian Literature I
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 872 Topics in Canadian Literature II
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 873 Topics in Canadian Literature III
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 874 Topics in Canadian Literature IV
Topic:  Literary Place and Space in Canada
This graduate course examines narratives from diaspora, Indigenous and settler populations in Canada that highlight territorial claiming, whether it be in rural or urban environments, and in forms as varied as traditional Indigenous stories or hip hop’s practice of “reppin’ ”. In the landmark 1997 land claim Delgamuukw vs. British Columbia, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that traditional Indigenous story was admissible in court as evidence of land ownership, legitimizing a kind of literary land claim. How do the narratives in question claim land, and what does that say about the various communities? What are the politics of claiming stolen land, and how do class, race, cultural practice, gender and sexuality play into questions of territorial belonging, nationhood and connection to place? Three term-hours; fall.

ENGL 875 Studies in Postcolonial Literatures 
Not offered 2024-25. 

ENGL 876 Topics in Postcolonial Literatures I 
Not offered 2024-25. 

ENGL 877 Topics in Postcolonial Literatures II
Not offered 2024-25. 

ENGL 878 Topics in Postcolonial Literatures III
Not offered 2024-25. 

ENGL 879 Topics in Postcolonial Literatures IV
Not offered 2024-25. 

ENGL 880 Studies in American Literature
Not offered 2024-25. 

ENGL 881 Topics in American Literature I
Not offered 2024-25. 

ENGL 882 Topics in American Literature II
Not offered 2024-25. 

ENGL 883 Topics in American Literature III 
Not offered 2024-25. 

ENGL 884 Topics in American Literature IV
Not offered 2024-25. 

ENGL 890 Directed Cross-Disciplinary Research 
This course is designed to allow M.A. students to undertake a program of graduate-level directed reading under the supervision of faculty in departments outside English Language and Literature. Permission of the external supervisor is required in advance of registration, and workload and evaluation for the course must be approved by the graduate coordinator in English to ensure consistency with English graduate course norms.

ENGL 892 Literary Internship
This course is a pass/fail credit course which offers MA students placements in research, literacy, language, and arts-related community organizations, with the aim of providing those students with job experience that is directly related to literary studies. Sample placements may include such organizations as Kingston WritersFest or the Strathy Language Unit at Queen’s University. To achieve a pass in ENGL 892, the student shall submit to the Graduate Chair a time sheet (signed by his/her placement supervisor) stating that 50 hours of work have been completed satisfactorily, and hand in a brief written summary report (1200 words) on the experience to the Graduate Chair.  

ENGL 895 Directed Reading
Directed study under the guidance of a faculty member in an area of the instructor’s expertise. Permission of instructor and graduate coordinator in English is required in advance of registration and is granted only under special circumstances. Workload and evaluation for the course must be approved by the graduate coordinator in English to ensure consistency with English graduate course norms. (Available only to students enrolled in the English MA program or year 1 of the MPhil program.)

ENGL 896 MPhil Field Preparation
This course is graded on a Pass/Fail basis.

ENGL 899 Master's Thesis Research 

ENGL 900 Introduction to Professional and Pedagogical Skills II
This course is designed to acquaint doctoral students with some aspects of the teaching and scholarly skills and responsibilities of university faculty in order to prepare them for an academic career. In addition to practical training in essay marking, lecturing techniques and other teaching methods, the course will offer training in bibliographical and archival research, grant application, the academic job market, and other practical aspects of the professional study of literature. The course will consist of a number of seminars and workshops geared to the particular stage of the student’s progress over three years in the program. Three term-hours; fall.  

ENGL 903 Research Forum I
A regularly scheduled forum in which faculty, advanced doctoral students, and visiting scholars present model research problems and methodologies for discussion. Attendance is required. Graded on a Pass/Fail basis. Various speakers.

ENGL 950 Comparative Literature I
An introduction to comparative literary studies as currently practised, with particular emphasis on the relevance to such studies of contemporary theories of literature and criticism. This course will be given jointly with CLAS-850.
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 951 Comparative Literature II 
Specialized study in a comparative context of particular authors, themes, movements, periods, genres, literary forms, or some combination of these elements. This course will be given jointly with CLAS-851.
Not offered 2024-25.

ENGL 990 Directed Cross-Disciplinary Research
This course is designed to allow doctoral students to undertake a program of graduate-level directed reading under the supervision of faculty in departments outside English Language and Literature. Permission of the external supervisor is required in advance of registration, and workload and evaluation for the course must be approved by the graduate coordinator in English to ensure consistency with English graduate course norms.

ENGL 995 Directed Reading 
Directed study under the guidance of a faculty member in an area of the instructor’s expertise. Permission of instructor and graduate coordinator in English is required in advance of registration and is granted only under special circumstances. Workload and evaluation for the course must be approved by the graduate coordinator in English to ensure consistency with English graduate course norms. (Available only to students enrolled in the English PhD program or year 2 or the MPhil program.)

ENGL 999 PhD Thesis Research